Potentially Inexpensive 10-Gb/s Tunable Dispersion Compensator With Low Polarization Sensitivity

We previously reported a simple 10-Gb/s Mach-Zehnder-interferometer-type tunable dispersion compensator that requires only one control voltage. However, we used an expensive polarization-diversity scheme to achieve polarization independence. Here, we take advantage of the device symmetry and use a single half-wave plate to achieve low polarization sensitivity, saving significant cost and size. We demonstrate 200-km transmission of 10-Gb/s chirped nonreturn-to-zero data with only 1.8-dB path penalty.