Abstract
The spiraling demand for undersea cable capacity has continued unabated throughout the last decade. This has led to the development of several generations of optical undersea systems operating at ever-increasing bit rates. All such long systems have, to date, made use of digital regenerators as repeaters, with the technology of STCs NL16 reaching the pinnacle of this chain of evolution. NL16 supports 2.4 Gbit/s of SDH/SONET traffic over each fiber pair, allowing a capacity of 10 Gbit/ s through a fully equipped cable. The achievement of this level of performance while still achieving undersea reliability required the development of several component technologies, including silicon and multiple-quantum-well lasers. A clear requirement was for a robust design, able to offer significant margins against transmission degradation, even over the long period of projected operation for such a system. All mechanisms that might lead to impairments, such as error-rate floors, therefore had to be understood and eliminated. The result has been a highly successful design that is proving to be more manufacturable than its lower-speed predecessors. The steps taken to achieve the performance and to prove its consistency are described in the presentation.
© 1994 Optical Society of America
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