Optical Pulse Formats for Fiber Optic Digital Communications

Some new optical pulse formats are investigated for solving practical problems in fiber optic communication systems. These pulse formats provide many advantageous features such as error monitoring capability, abundant timing information, uniform optical power utilization, stable detection of optical input, and so forth. It is shown that a modification of Personick's receiver design theory can be used for comparison of various optical pulse formats. The comparison suggests that for state-of-the-art fiber systems with moderate fiber loss and moderate repeater spacing, where no pulse equalization is required, some new classes of 1 binary digit converted to 2 binary digits (1B2B) or 2B3B formats will permit the realization of very simple and reliable repeaters for fiber optic digital transmission. A future low-loss fiber system may permit a very long repeater spacing with the help of equalization. In this case, application of the correlative signal-processing technique is shown to be very promising. Experimental 6.3 Mbit/s and 100 Mbit/s transmissions demonstrate some advantageous features of these optical pulse formats.