Optical Fibre Up-Taper Back-Reflector for Laser Transmitter Evaluation

INTRODUCTION: As optical communications systems progress to higher data rates, reflection effects become increasingly detrimental to system performance. Reflections cause two types of system degradation. First, optical feedback into the laser cavity causes amplitude and phase fluctuations, introducing errors in the transmitted bit stream. Second, when more than one reflection point exists in a system, doubly reflected light interferes at the receiver with unreflected light, causing interference between different time slots in the bit stream. Thus multi=path interference (MPI) has been shown to cause data-dependent error bursts and bit-error-rate floors and is unaffected by laser isolation.