Dispersion-compensating fibers and their applications

Summary form only given. The concept of compensating for chromatic dispersion of optical fiber by concatenating different fibers with dispersion of opposite signs was proposed in the early stage of single-mode fiber development. It was, however, only a few years ago, obviously triggered by the rapid success of erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs), when dispersion-compensating fibers (DCFs) began to be widely developed to combat the large chromatic dispersion of conventional single-mode fibers (SMFs) in the 1.55-/spl mu/m window.