Abstract

Future soliton transmission systems rely on suitable sources of solitons. During the last few years, several candidates have been reported, including mode-locked monolithic semiconductor lasers,^1-4 mode-locked hybrid-cavity lasers,⁵ gain-switched semiconductor lasers followed by filtering and pulse compression,⁶ mode-locked fiber ring lasers (for example, see Refs. 7-9), as well as electroabsorption¹⁰ and Mach-Zehnder¹¹ modulators shaping the solitons from a cw beam. A subset of the soliton sources are the mode-locked monolithic extended-cavity lasers. After a general review of the field, this talk focuses on a monolithic integrated semiconductor device that provides the functionality of a soliton transmitter in a single chip.

© 1994 Optical Society of America