Tunable Dispersion Compensatin in a 160 Gb/s TDM System by a Voltage Controlled Chirped Fiber Bragg Grating

We demonstrate for the first time that an electrically tunable chirped fiber Bragg grating can be used to trim the dispersion in a 160 Gb/s TDM system with a RZ duty cycle of 30%. The fully packaged dispersion compensation module is capable of recovering the 2 ps pulses over a tuning range of 50 ps/nm with a system penalty of less than 1.3 dB compared to the case of zero dispersion with no fiber grating. We believe this is the first demonstration of a tunable dispersion compensator that, together with standard fixed compensation like dispersion compensation fiber, enables practical dynamic dispersion management of 160 Gb/s TDM systems.