Nyquist pulse shaping using arrayed waveguide grating routers.

Abstract

We propose and demonstrate by simulations a novel Nyquist-WDM (N-WDM) superchannel transmitter based on an arrayed waveguide grating router (AWGR). This approach can generate Nyquist pulses at multiple wavelengths using a single AWGR. Results for a 3-channel 960-Gbit/s QPSK superchannel system show that a 10% guard band reduces the inter-channel interference (ICI) sufficiently. The design introduces less than 0.16-dB penalty when the waveguide loss is 2 dB/cm and 0.73-dB penalty when the standard deviation of phase error is 10°. Such Nyquist pulse shapers can be realised on a chip scale using photonic integrated circuits technology, and could be compactly integrated with other functional components to create single-chip N-WDM superchannel transmitters.