Microsecond switching of parametric tunable dispersion compensator

A record-fast, 2μs switching operation of an optical tunable dispersion compensator is demonstrated with a parametric tunable dispersion compensation scheme. We alternately switch two optical paths having different net dispersions with a microsecond guard interval of the compensator response and achieve successful transmissions of 43Gbit/s non-return-to-zero on–off-keying optical signals. The error-free guard time for the switching of the two optical paths is 125μs, limited mostly by the clock synchronization of the bit-error detector. The power penalty due to the switching of the compensator is less than 0.5dB.