Pulse generation for soliton systems using lithium niobate modulators

We describe the principle of operation and performance of several soliton pulse sources and also a complete soliton transmitter based on lithium niobate modulators. Subsystems based on lithium niobate modulators are attractive because the modulators are now commercially available, qualified for system use, can operate up to very high speeds, and can operate over a wide wavelength range. The pulse sources we describe are based on two techniques. The first is the chirped pulse compression technique in which one or two sinusoidally driven modulators generate frequency chirped pulses that are subsequently compressed to the desired width using dispersion in a fiber. In the second technique, sinusoidally driven modulators are cascaded serially to form pulses. Using these techniques we produced nearly transform-limited pulses at repetition rates up to 15 GHz with a FWHM pulsewidths from 10-33% of the pulse period. A complete soliton transmitter using a single modulator to simultaneously generate optical pulses and encode data is also discussed. The performance of this compact transmitter in a 2.5-Gb/s soliton system experiment is comparable to other more common soliton transmitters.