synQPSK
  Univ. Paderborn, Germany
  CeLight Israel
  Photline, France
  IPAG, Germany
  Univ. Duisburg-Essen, Germany

Key Components for Synchronous Optical Quadrature Phase Shift Keying Transmission
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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.

http://ont.upb.de/synQPSK/

 

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