Electronic Dispersion Compensation Beyond 10 Gb/s

The dispersion tolerance in an optical transmission system tends to be proportional to the inverse square of the bit rate of the optical channel. A variety of methods have been used to compensate chromatic dispersion at 10 Gb/s with subsequent improvements in dispersion tolerance ranging from 800 ps/nm to 80,000 ps/nm, and also a range of circuit costs. At 40 and 100 Gb/s not only is the impact of dispersion more stringent, but the circuit challenges are also severe. In this presentation we will discuss the scaling of electronic dispersion compensation methods to 40 and 100 Gb/s, and show full dispersion compensation in a 40 Gb/s product.