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IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 1, NO. 8, AUGUST 1989

5 Gbit/s Direct Optical DPSK Modulation of a 1530-nm DFB Laser

R. S. VODHANEL

Abstract-5 Gbit/s direct optical differential-phase-shift-keying @PSK) modulation of a 1530-nm distributed feedback laser bas been demonstrated using injection current modulation with a bipolar signal format. There was no degradation of the optical DPSK signal due to thermal frequency modulation of the laser. This direct DPSK modulation technique avoids the insertion loss and systems complexity of external DPSK modulators.

Fiber

Receiver

Fig. 1.

Method for direct optical DPSK modulation of a DFB laser and delay demodulation using an interferometer.

INTRODUCTION IRECT frequency modulation of distributed feedback (DFB) lasers is interesting for optical communications at data rates in the gigabit/second range because of the highspeed frequency modulation (FM) capability of DFB lasers [l] and since the additional loss and system complexity of external modulators can be avoided. There have been recent reports of frequency-shift-keying (FSK) modulation of a 153O-m DFB laser at 5 Gbit/s 121 and direct phase modulation at 4 Gbit/s [3] using a related technique of frequency modulation with a

DIRECT OPTICAL DPSK MODULATION DELAY AND DEMODULATION

Direct DPSK modulation of a DFB laser is achieved using injection current modulation with a differentially encoded bipolar signal, as shown schematically in Fig. 1. Delay is performed using an interferometer with a delay time T equal to the duration of one bit [3]. The input and differentially encoded NRZ signals are shown in Fig. 2(a) and reswtively. The current signal, return-to-zero signal format. For both direct detection and the time derivative of the NRZ coherent detection systems, direct frequency or phase modula- shown in Fig* 2(c) is tion of DFB lasers are attractive alternatives to on-off intensity signal Of Fig. 2@). An impomt advantage Of the 1 ~ - 2 signal format is that modulation of the laser temperature is ~ modulation, since a small modulation current of as the negligible VI since the bipolar pulse width is very short produces a whose spectral width is as information bandwidth. A narrow spectral width is desired to 'Ompared to the laser" thermal response time Of about ps, minimize the intersymbol interference due to fiber chromatic and since the time between successive current pulses, which Of Opposite Polarity, is also much shorter than the dispersion [3]. In contrast, the wavelength chirping which are accompanies direct on-off intensity modulation considerably thermal response time. Since thermal FM is suppressed, the broadens the optical spectrum relative to the information modulated optical frequency has the same bipolar waveform as current. The Optical phase + ( t ) is bandwidth, potentially resulting in large systems degradations the Optical frequency. As shown unless the operating wavelength closely matches the fiber's the time integral Of the in Fig. 2(d), +(t) is a replica of the differentially encoded NRZ zero-dispersion wavelength [4], [51. A problem with injection current modulation using unipolar signal of Fig. 2@). An optical phase shift of ?r radians can be signals such as nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) or return-to-zero obtained if Af * At = 0.5, where Af is the optical frequency (RZ) formats is the accompanying temperature modulation in deviation and A t is the bipolar pulse width. The demodulated is given by semiconductor lasers [6]. Temperature modulation of the laser signal at the Output Of the interferometer,
can produce large drifts in the optic- frequency or phase
66zeros99

or resulting in Severe during long strings of distortions in the demodulated In this letter, we report (DPSK) moduladirect optical differential-phase-shift-keying tion of a 153O-m DFB laser at 5 Gbits/s without degradations FM, using injection current modulation with a due to bipolar signal format [7].
'60nes99

Manuscript received April 10, 1989; revised May 31, 1989. The author is with Bellcore, Red Bank, NJ 07701. IEEE Log Number 8929809.

I ( t ) = (1012) [1 + COS (27th' T + 60+ A+(t))], where Io is the input intensity (we have ignored the residual amplitude modulation, which is small when the laser is biased at high Output power), f0 is the average Optical frequency, A+( t , is the value Of the phase difference between the Optical signals from the two branches of the interferometer, and +o is the interferometer phase offset. Fig. 2(e) shows A+(t) when the interferometer delay equals a bit period, as shown in Fig. 2(d). By adjusting the opti-cal frequency or phase offset such that 27rf0*T + +o = 2?rm, where m is an integer, the output intensity is I( t) = IOcos' [A+( t)/2] and the input NRZ signal

1041-1135/89/08OO-0218$01.OO 0 1989 IEEE

VODHANEL: OPTICAL DPSK MODULATION OF DFB LASER

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D
4

&l300ps

(a) NRZ (b) d-NRZ

(c) i(t),f(t) (d) O(t)

(a)

(e)AO(t) (f) I(t) 0

Time

Fig. 2. Signal waveforms: (a) NRZ input, (b) differentially encoded NRZ, (c) bipolar modulationcurrent i(t) and optical FM signalflt), (d) modulated optical phase &( t )- the dashed curve is the same as the solid, but delayed one bit-period, (e) A&([), and (f) delay demodulated signal I(t).

of Fig. 2(a) is recovered from the demodulated signal Z ( t ) , as shown in Fig. 2(f). The spikes, which occur between consecutive zeros, are artifacts of delay demodulation of differentially encoded bit sequences where the phase difference between successive bits changes from + T to - ?r or - ?r to + T with a finite transition time. If this phase transition time is greater than a significant fraction of the bit period due to insufficient transmitter bandwidth, then some eye closure may result. For the case of bipolar modulation where the drive pulse width equals T/2, we estimate about a 1 dB eye closure when the transmitter bandwidth is to 0.7 times the bit rate compared to when the transmitter bandwidth is twice the bit rate.

(C)

EXPERIMENT A 1530-nm DFB laser with a 12 GHz FM bandwidth [l] is directly modulated with a 5 Gbit/s bipolar signal having a pulse width of about 100 ps. NRZ-to-bipolar conversion is achieved with a transversal filter with a delay of about 100 ps. The bipolar signal current is amplified to a 18 mA, to produce an optical frequency deviation of about k 5 GHz. The laser output power is 8 mW, producing a linewidth of 15 MHz. Delay demodulation is accomplished using a birefringent fiber interferometer [ 11 with a delay of about 200 ps, followed by a p-i-n photodetector with flat response out to 15 GHz. No differential encoder is needed since the differentially encoded pseudorandom pattern is the same as the original pseudorandom pattern, except shifted by several bits. RESULTS DISCUSSION AND Fig. 3(a) and (b) shows the DPSK and AM waveforms, respectively, for 5 Gbit/s bipolar modulation of the DFB laser using a 215 - 1 length pseudorandom pattern. These waveforms correspond to a portion of the pseudorandom pattern which contains a sequence of 15 zeros followed by 14 ones. The 15 successive zeros in the DPSK signal are separated by the spikes discussed above and shown in Fig. 2(f). The following sequence of 14 ones represents the worst case for thermal FM for this pseudorandom pattern, since this sequence spans the longest time between successive bipolar pulses. There is no drift due to thermal FM in the 2.8 ns long string of demodulated ones, which is expected since this time interval is about three order of magnitude smaller than the DFB lasers thermal response time. The suppression of thermal FM is important since otherwise a high-speed method for tracking it would be necessary to maintain the proper phase adjustment for delay demodulation with an

Fig. 3.

Detected signals at 5 Gbits/s: (a) delay demodulated DPSK, (b) residual AM, and (c) DPSK eye pattern (50 pddiv).

interferometer in the case of direct detection, or for controlling the intermediate frequency in the case of coherent detection. The AM signal shown in Fig. 3(b) follows the bipolar modulation signal with an amplitude modulation of a 2 0 percent. The small amplitude modulation is due to the lasers high-output power level and the small modulation current. In contrast, a large on-off ratio of 9 : l was obtained for the DPSK signal. Fig. 3(c) shows the open eye pattern which was obtained for 5 Gbit/s DPSK modulation with a pseudorandom pattern. The required IF linewidth for coherent DPSK detection at 5 Gbits/s is about 15 MHz [8], which can be met with conventional DFB lasers. The DFB laser used in this work, which has a linewidth of 15 MHz, could be used in a coherent DPSK system if a narrow linewidth external cavity local oscillator laser is used in the coherent DPSK receiver. Further work is required to establish heterodyne system bit-error-rate performance as a function of laser linewidth using this direct DPSK modulation technique. CONCLUSION 5 Gbit/s direct DPSK modulation of a 1530-nm DFB laser has been demonstrated using injection current modulation with a bipolar signal format. There was no degradation of the demodulated DPSK signal due to thermal frequency modulation. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The author is grateful to R. E. Wagner for stimulating and informative discussions and for his encouragement, and to Dr.

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N. Chinone of Hitachi Central Research Laboratory for providing the DFB laser.

IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LEITERS, VOL. 1, NO. 8, AUGUST 1989

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REFERENCES
[I] R. S. Vodhanel and S. Tsuji, 12 GHz FM-bandwidth for a 1530-nm DFB laser, IEE Electron. Lett., vol. 24, pp. 1359-1361, 1988. [2] R. S . Vodhanel, T. P. Lee, and S . Tsuji, 5 Gbit/s optical FSK modulation of a 1530-nm DFB laser, in Proc. 14th Euro. Conf. Opt. Commun., part 1, Brighton, 1988, pp. 171-174. [3] M. Shirasaki, H. Nishimoto, T. Okiyama, and T. Touge, Fibre transmission properties of optical pulses produced through direct phase modulation of DFB laser diode, IEE Electron. Lett., vol. 24, pp. 486488, 1988. [4] R. Heidemann, U. Scholz, and B. Wedding, 5 Gbit/s transmission [6] [7] [8]

experiment over 111 km of optical fibre, IEE Electron. Lett., vol. 23, pp. 1030-1032, 1987. S. Fujita, N. Henmi, I. Takano, M. Yamaguchi, T. Torikai, T. Suzaki, S. Takano, H. Ishihara, and M. Shikada, A 10 Gbls-80 km optical fiber transmission experiment using a directly modulated DFB-LD and a high speed InGaAs-APD, in Proc. ConJ. Opt. Fiber Commun., OFC88, New Orleans, LA, 1988, Postdeadline paper PD16. S. Kobayashi, Y. Yamamoto, I. Minoru, and T. Kimura, Direct frequency modulation in AlGaAs semiconductor lasers, IEEE J. Quantum Electron., vol. QE-18, pp. 582-595, 1982. R. S. Vodhanel, B. Enning, and A. F. Elrefaie, Bipolar optical FSK transmission experiments at 150 Mbits/s and 1 Gbit/s, J. Lightwave Technol., vol. 6, pp. 1549-1553, 1988. G. Nicolson, Probability of error for optical heterodyne DPSK system with quantum phase noise, IEE Electron. Lett., vol. 20, pp. 10051007, 1984.