32 Gb/s optical soliton data transmission over 90 km

The authors demonstrate error-free optical soliton transmission at 32 Gb/s over 90 km of dispersion-shifted fiber. Fiber loss was compensated for by using diode laser pumped Er/sup 3+/-doped fiber amplifiers located every 30 km and a 4 Gb/s data pattern was passively multiplexed to 32 Gb/s. Approximately 16-ps-wide, near transform-limited pulses were launched into the system and the output pulsewidth was about 14 ps. At the receiver, four-wave mixing was employed to perform all optical demultiplexing of the data down to the base data rate. At a 10/sup -9/ (2/sup 15/-1 word length) bit-error rate, the penalties from the demultiplexing and the 90-km soliton transmission were approximately 1.6 and 0.5 dB, respectively.<<ETX>>