Equivalent Optical Bandwidth of Reflective Electro-Absorption Modulator Based Optical Source with a Broadband Seed Light for a 2.5 Gb/s and Beyond Signal Transmission

Abstract

The impact of equivalent optical bandwidth on the performance of a system using a reflective electroabsorption modulator (R-EAM) based optical source has been experimentally evaluated with signals operating at 2.5 Gb/s and beyond. The equivalent optical bandwidth of our source with a broadband seed light was simply adjusted by using a bandwidth tunable optical filter. From the measurements, we have estimated the required equivalent optical bandwidth of our source for an error-free transmission (@ bit-error-rate of $10^{-12}$ ) and a forward error correction (FEC) threshold of $2{\times}10^{-4}$ .