Chirped-pulse wavelength-division multiplexing at 155 Mbit/s with active feed-forward channel equalization

The broad bandwidth of femtosecond lasers make them potential sources for wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) systems. The difficulty is in spectrally slicing out the channels and modulating them. A technique for doing both simultaneously was recently demonstrated. In this technique, known as chirped-pulse WDM (CPWDM), a femtosecond pulse is linearly chirped by passage through a dispersive delay line such as a single-mode fiber. Here we demonstrate the scaling of this concept to 155-MHz repetition rate and the use of a feed-forward technique to actively equalize the channels, increasing the number of channels by approximately 50%.