1 Gb/s system performance of an integrated, polarization-independent, acoustically-tunable optical filter

The first system demonstration of a polarization-independent acoustooptic filter centered at 1500 nm with a narrow bandpass (1.3 nm) and broad continuous tuning range (145 nm) is reported. It is shown that filtered transmission of 990-Mb/s pseudorandom data incurs less than 1 dB of additional noise penalty, less than 0.5 dB of which is dependent on the signal state of polarization. In addition, this versatile polarization-diversity configuration allows for multiple-channel selection and operation as a 2*2 wavelength-channel switch. >