February 16, 2017 Administrator

Laboratory

Optiklab group has a laboratory were optical communication experiments, both for didactic and research purposes, can be carried out.

Activities

Over year laboratory activities consisted of measurements/experiments in the following optical communications sectors:

  • EDFA amplified transmission over up to 500km of straight-line dispersion-managed fiber of WDM signals with 10Gb/s OOK-NRZ modulation
  • “Recirculating loop” configuration to propagate the WDM signal over multiple distances of available fiber stretch
  • Characerization of direct-detection receivers with noise loading for bit-error-rate measurements. Use of advanced software to extrapolate BER and Q-factor from received high-quality data (Bergano’s method).
  • Analysis of power transients in EDFAs, and semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA) without and with gain-clamping (GC) (standard GC-Alcatel SOAs and Finisar vertical-cavity linear optical amplifiers (LOA)).
  • SOA and GC-SOA measurements in collaboration with Turin Politechnic PhotonLab within the Italian-ministry funded projects OSATE and WONDER, and with research group of Prof. L. A. Rusch at Laval University, Québec, Canada.
  • Measurements of propagation of Gb-Ethernet signals over multi-mode fibers. theoretical study and simulations of 10GbE MMF propagation.

Equipment

The following main measurement equipment is available:

  • Error Detector and Pulse Pattern Generator up to 10 Gbit/s – Anritsu
  • Optical Spectrum Analyzer- HP/Agilent
  • Tunable Laser – Photonetics
  • Sampling Oscilloscope – HP/Agilent
  • Power Meters – HP/Agilent e  Anritsu
  • Programmable Attenuators – Anritsu and Photodyne
  • Laser Drivers – ILX technologies
  • Vector Network Analyzer – HP/Agilent
  • Wavelength Meter – HP/Agilent

Miscellaneous optical and electro-optical components:

  • Mach-Zehnder 10 Gb/s Modulators – Pirelli
  • Drivers for 10 Gb/s modulators – Miteq
  • Amplified Photodiodes at 10 Gb/s – Miteq / Nortel
  • EDFA – Pirelli / Cisco
  • LOA – Genoa/Finisar
  • Demultiplexer/multiplexer Filters – JDS/Hitachi
  • CW Lasers – Fujitsu/Mitsubishi
  • 2.5 Gb/s and 10 Gb/s Lasers with integrated MZ modulator – Nortel/Bookham, engineered at Lubljana University – Prof. Vidmar’s group

All instruments are connected to PCs through IEEE-488 (GPIB) interfaces.
Many components and instruments are generous donations by: Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent (now Nokia) and Marconi (now Ericsson).

Pictures