Transient effects and cascadability of a MEMS based dynamic gain equalizing filter: a case study

We investigate the cascadability and transient effects of a MEMS based 64-channels blocker. We observe no transient effect due to the blocker. The blocker can be cascaded with negligible optical power penalty up to 10 cascades with or without the 7 dB maximum allowable equalization for both NRZ and RZ pulses. We show the usage of a filter to eliminate out-of-band ASE is essential in the operation of this class of wavelength management subsystem.