Effectiveness of electronic equalizer for filter concatenation effect of low-cost 2.5Â Gb/s rated DML sources operated at 10Â Gb/s

The improvement on the impact of filter concatenation effect on optical signal quality is investigated and discussed for applications in metropolitan optical networks utilizing cost-effective 10-Gb/s transmitters. The sources are low-cost conventional directly modulated lasers (DMLs), fabricated for operation at 2.5 Gb/s but modulated at 10 Gb/s. Performance improvement is achieved by using decision-feedback equalization (DFE) at the receiver end. Experimental studies consider both transient and adiabatic chirp dominated DMLs sources with different chirp characteristics. Measurements have been obtained using a recirculating loop set-up and the performance improvement is evaluated in terms of bit-error-rate (BER) versus number of loops.