Generation and transmission of optical soliton pulses

Various new technologies have been proposed for optical soliton communications as a consequence of progress in the development of erbium-doped optical fiber amplifiers, and excellent experimental results with optical soliton communications have been reported. Since transform-limited pulses are very important in soliton transmission, optical soliton generation technologies using mode-locked semiconductor lasers, fiber lasers, gain-switched semiconductor lasers, and electroabsorption modulators are described first in this paper. The realization of soliton transmissions is then discussed along with advances in technology. Soliton transmission using dispersion allocation is shown to be more feasible because of the large power margin and large dispersion tolerance. (C) 1997 Scripta Technica, Inc.