A holey fiber-based nonlinear thresholding device for optical CDMA receiver performance enhancement

We demonstrate the use of an optical thresholder based on a short length of holey fiber to achieve enhanced code recognition quality in a 255-chip 320-Gchip/s superstructured fiber Bragg grating-based optical code-division multiple access code:decode system. The nonlinear thresholder is based on bandpass filtering of spectrally broadened components generated by self-phase modulation and assisted by the Raman effect in an 8.7 m length of highly nonlinear holey fiber. Error free penalty free system performance is obtained with complete recovery of the original input pulse shape.