Abstract

The advent of laser-diode pumped erbium-doped fiber amplifiers operating in the 1.5 µm band has led to rapid progress being made on high speed optical communication in the GHz region.¹ In order to increase further the information capacity in an intensity-modulation/direct detection scheme, a high speed intensity modulator is indispensable. Although Lithium Niobate (LN) Mach-Zehnder type modulators have been commonly used in transmission experiments,² interest has recently focused on the ElectroAbsorption (EA) modulator as it has a very wide band with a lower driving voltage than a conventional LN modulator.^3,4 Another advantage of this device is that it can be used to generate transform-limited sech or Gaussian pulses simply by applying sinusoidal voltage modulations at different bias voltages.⁵ Such pulses were applied to soliton transmission as a simple soliton source and successful operation was reported.⁶

© 1993 Optical Society of America