Performance of single-electrode 1.5- mu m DFB lasers in noncoherent FSK transmission

The author reports the results of an investigation of the performance of single-electrode 1.5- mu m DFB (distributed feedback) lasers in 1.7-Gb/s noncoherent frequency-shift-keyed (NC-FSK) transmission. Sixteen commercial laser transmitters were characterized in terms of FSK transmission sensitivity, eye-margin, chromatic dispersion penalty and pattern dependence. Using amplitude-shift-keying (ASK) performance as a baseline, FSK is shown to outperform ASK when dispersion is present, while ASK is slightly better with no dispersion. FSK transmitters with commercial single-electrode DFB lasers are shown to provide an attractive alternative to ASK in dispersion limited systems. The FSK degradations mainly result from an inadequate FM modulation index and a thermal-FM index manifested as a pattern length dependence.>