System limitations due to chromatic dispersion and receiver bandwidth for 2-D time-wavelength OCDMA systems

We investigate chromatic-dispersion effects of pulse-spreading and wavelength-skew on a 2-D time-wavelength, optical code division multiple access system (OCDMA). We find that wavelength skew, which is specific to a bit-parallel system, overwhelmingly dominates the OCDMA system performance. For a 3-wavelength and 7-chip-time optimized code, a 10-Gchip/sec system is limited to under 4 kms.