Design optimization of chirped FBG as a dispersion compensator

D. Aneesh1, A.Vishnu Vardhanan2, and R.Gangopadhyay3

Dept. of Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur

E-mail: d_aneesh@yahoo.com1, a.vishnu@gmail.com2, ranjan@ece.iitkgp.ernet.in3

the present study we show that further design optimization can be effected if one uses asymmetric tanh apodisation. .

Abstract:
Chirped fiber Bragg grating (FBG) provides an attractive solution for low cost dispersion compensation in a fiber optic transmission system. The present work carries out the design optimization of a chirped FBG in respect of chirp bandwidth and apodisation profile in achieving optimum dispersion compensation in a 40Gbps optical transmission link for different modulation formats.

2. Design Procedure Optimization and Simulation

A number of parameters are involved in the design of a fiber Bragg grating. The design of chirped FBG for dispersion compensation requires proper choice of various grating related parameters. The following steps are involved in the design. 1) Calculate the grating length as

1. Introduction:
Linearly chirped fiber Bragg gratings are commonly used for dispersion compensation in 10Gbps optical transmission systems. The availability of mass production techniques and low cost has made this device very attractive for dispersion compensation. Even in higher bit rates such as 40Gbps case they are also found to be very effective. The performance of a chirped FBG is controlled by several parameters such as the length of the grating used for compensation, chirp bandwidth, apodisation profile, ac index modulation depth and the number of uniform steps in the grating. Several studies are carried out to optimize design procedure for dispersion compensating chirped FBG. The critical parameters for the design of a chirped FBG used as dispersion compensator are the grating length, chirped bandwidth and the apodisation profile. Conventional approach for choosing the length of the grating ( Lg ) based on the knowledge of the signal bandwidth and amount of the fiber dispersion to be compensated. Such a procedure needs adhoc trial of fixing the length of the grating to be 2Lg, 3Lg etc in order to achieve the best performance. However this approach does also consider how different modulation formats may require the FBG length optimization. The present procedure determines the choice of the FBG length based on appropriate selection of chirped bandwidth containing a desired level of signal energy Eth depending on the performance optimization required. It is known that optimization of apodisation profile has a distinctive role in ensuring minimum delay ripple across the grating bandwidth. As per current literature the symmetric tanh apodisation is claimed to be the best apodisation profile. In

2 L g = L f BD 2n (1)
Lf is the length of the fiber, D is the fiber dispersion parameter (ps/nm/km), B is the signal bandwidth, is the central wavelength and n is the effective refractive index. 2) For a given length Lg the number of uniform sections is chosen to be 60 or higher. The grating simulation is carried out by transfer matrix approach [6] for an adequately chosen value of the chirp bandwidth, neff=1.45, ac modulation index at optimized value 1.2x10 -4 an and appropriate apodisation profile (tanh) to maintain a desired accuracy and the performance targets. 3) For a chosen value of the chirped bandwidth it is further necessary to optimize the grating length to be 2Lg, 3Lg etc. in order to achieve the optimum result. It may be noted that the above choice of length also varies depending on the signal modulation used. This may be appreciated referring to Table 1 which shows that for the eye opening penalty (EOP) of 0.2 dB for the dispersion compensated 40Gbps signal at the output of the grating, the grating length differs depending on the value of the chirp bandwidth and the modulation format. The above design procedure suffers because the choice of chirp bandwidth does not actually take into account the detailed nature of the signal spectrum.

Table1: FBG parameters for an EOP of 0.2 dB for different modulation formats: Chirp Modulation Length(cm) Bandwidth(nm) Format NRZ 10.00 0.8 21.00 1.6 RZ 20.30 1.6 26.30 2.0 CSRZ 10.29 0.8 20.68 1.6

Figure 2 also depicts the EOP performance with fiber length for two different values of chirp bandwidth providing different levels of energy for NRZ signaling format. Table2. Energy content in a given signal bandwidth
Percentage energy in a Bandwidth Signal Bandwidth

( Eth)
NRZ RZ CSRZ

2.1 Present Design approach

In this design we tried to optimize the design in terms of the length of the grating, chirp bandwidth and apodisation. For all other parameters standard values are adopted. DC index modulation of zero and AC index modulation of 1.2x10 -4 are taken for all the cases. Number of steps in the calculation of grating is chosen to be 100.

0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.8 2 3

97.63 97.81 98.47 98.78 98.81 99.18 99.20 99.50

61.04 87.30 89.63 90.21 90.30 91.05 94.09 95.12

97.37 98.25 99.08 99.75 99.85 99.91 99.96 100

Length optimization:
The choice of Lg can be simplified by taking B in (1) as the chirp bandwidth of the dispersion compensator. The interdependence of parameters in the past design and ambiguity can be removed by this method. In order to find out the amount of chirped bandwidth needed for effective compensation we consider the bandwidth containing energy above a certain threshold. For example Table2 shows the energy content in a specified bandwidth for different modulation format. Based on the required EOP one can choose the signal bandwidth containing energy greater than the threshold. Based on this value of chirp bandwidth the grating length is calculated using (1). The above approach is used for the simulation based design of the chirped FBG for dispersion compensation. In the simulation a PN sequence of length 26-1 at 40Gbps is generated which is used to produce a modulated signal (NRZ, RZ and CSRZ) from the Mach Zahnder modulator. The output from Mach Zahnder modulator is coupled to a single mode fiber (D=16ps/nm/Km). The received output is filtered by an optical Bessel filter (3dB bandwidth=160GHz) and after photo detection is filtered by an electrical filter (3dB bandwidth= 28GHz). Split step Fourier method is used to simulate the propagation through the fiber and transfer matrix method [6] is used for simulation of the Bragg grating. The performance result of grating is expressed in terms of EOP vs chirp bandwidth for different modulation formats. As one finds from Fig. 1 that depending on the modulation format appropriate chirp bandwidth needs to be utilized in the design for obtaining required EOP. It is also found from simulation that for an EOP of 0.2 dB the required energy threshold Eth =98%, 96% and 98% for NRZ, RZ and CSRZ respectively.
EOP(dB)

10 8 6 4 2 0 0 2
Chirp Bandwidth (nm) NRZ RZ CSRZ

Fig. 1. EOP variation of EOP for different chirp Bandwidth at 40Gbps

2.5 2
EOP (dB)

E=95% chirp BW=0.6nm E=99% chirp BW=1.6nm

1.5 1 0.5 0 70 75 80
Fiber Length (Km)

85

90

Fig. 2. EOP performance with distance for different chirp bandwidth providing different levels of energy for NRZ at 40Gbps

Apodisation Optimization:
Several investigations have been carried in the past out to find out the best apodisation profile for sidelobe suppression and improved time delay ripple performance [3] [7]. In literature it is found that symmetric tanh is the best known apodisation among these. We show here that further grating improvement can be effected if asymmetry is introduced in the tanh apodisation profile:

2az tanh ,0 z kL L ..(2) f (x ) = 2b(L z ) tanh , kL z L L

where a and b are tanh window parameters and k is asymmetric apodisation parameter.

4 3.5 3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0 70 75

Fiber Length ( Km)

tanh a=4 b=4 k=.5 tanh a=2 b=7 k=.8

EOP (dB)

80

85

90

Fig. 5.Comparison of EOP for asymmetric and symmetric apodisation

3. Conclusion
A simple easy-to-use design optimization of chirped FBG as dispersion compensator is presented. In particular, the criterion for appropriate choice of the chirp bandwidth based on threshold energy of the signal allows the determination of grating length automatically optimized. The procedure also easily accommodates length optimization for different modulation formats. Further, better length optimization can be achieved by introducing slope asymmetry in conventional tanh apodisation resulting in both decreased passband delay ripple and reduced EOP. Fig. 3. Asymmetric apodisation profiles Figure 3 shows several asymmetric apodisation profiles along the grating length for different values of a, b and the k value varies in the range of 0.1 to 0.9. The impact of the slope asymmetry on both EOP and mean time delay ripple is shown in Figure 4. Compared to symmetric tanh profile asymmetric tanh profile provides significant improvement of grating performance.
1 0.8 E O P (d B ) 0.6 0.4 0.2 0 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 Apodisation asymmtery(k)
Fig4.EOPand average time delay ripple versus apodisation asymmetry for NRZ at 40Gbps
A v erag e tim e d elay rip p le (p s) EOP Avg.time delay

References
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25 20 15 10 5 0

[4] K.Ennser, R I Laming and M.N. Zerva, Analysis of 40Gbps TDM-Transmission over Embedded Standard Fiber Employing Chirped Fiber Grating Dispersion Compensators, J.Lightwave Technology, pp 807-811 May 1998.

[5] F. Ouellette, Dispersion cancellation using linearly chirped Bragg grating filters in optical waveguides, Optics Letters, pp 847-849, October 1987. [6] Raman Kashyap, Fiber Bragg Grating, Sen Deigo, Academic Press, 1999.

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