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Press release
PADERBORN, Germany - On 30th July
2004, a consortium formed by the Univ. Paderborn in Germany and the companies
CeLight in Israel, Photline Technologies in Besançon, France, and Innovative
Processing AG (IPAG) in Duisburg, Germany, jointly announced the grant of
1.7 M€ of funding by the European Commission under its Sixth Framework
Programme for Research and Technological Development. The four partners have
teamed up to develop "Key Components for Synchronous Optical Quadrature
Phase Shift Keying Transmission".
In optical fiber communication,
this innovative modulation scheme dubbed "synQPSK" can quadruple
the information capacity when combined with additional polarization division
multiplexing. Existing wavelength division multiplex (WDM) systems with a
data rate of 10 Gb/s can be upgraded to 40 Gb/s per channel without any change
in the fiber plant. Specific advantages over time-division multiplexed 40
Gb/s transmission are an 8 times greater chromatic and a 3 times greater polarization
mode dispersion tolerance, and a superior receiver sensitivity which allows
reuse of the existing optical amplifiers. Furthermore, the inherent frequency
selectivity allows WDM channels to be packed very closely, which may permit
a further capacity increase.
Technically, a coherent optical
receiver is required, where a local oscillator is used to down-convert the
optical fields into the electrical baseband. While early synQPSK work has
required extremely expensive linewidth-narrowed lasers the consortium aims
at realizing synQPSK with state-of-the-art DFB lasers. The challenging developments
are a QPSK modulator, a 90° hybrid co-packaged with balanced photoreceivers,
microelectronic circuits for processing of the detected signals, and a 4x10.7
Gb/s testbed where these key components shall be integrated.
The partners believe that the synQPSK
technology, which they will develop during three years from July 2004 to June
2007, will allow for an evolutionary, graceful growth of transmission capacity
in an economically sensitive environment.