Tunable optical dispersion compensator with increased bandwidth via connection of a Mach-Zehnder-Interferometer to an affayed-waveguide grating

We propose and demonstrate a novel colorless tunable optical dispersion compensator (TODC) consisting of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) connected to an arrayed-waveguide grating with a thermooptic lens. The MZI approximately doubles the magnitude bandwidth at large dispersion settings. We demonstrate compensation of a 43-Gb/s nonreturn-to-zero signal dispersed over a range of -844 to +1700 ps/mn. To our knowledge, +1700 ps/nm is the largest demonstrated dispersion compensation amount of a 40-Gb/s signal with a single TODC.