Tunable Optical Dispersion Compensator with Increased Bandwidth via Connection of a Mach-Zehnder Interferometer to an Arrayed 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 non-return-to-zero signal dispersed over a range of 844 to +1700 ps/nm. +1700 ps/nm is the largest demonstrated dispersion compensation amount of a 40-Gb/s signal with a single TODC, to our knowledge.