598 IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 18, NO.

4, FEBRUARY 15, 2006

Ideal Duobinary Generating Filter for Optically

Amplified Systems
Ilya Lyubomirsky, Member, IEEE, and Cheng-Chung Chien, Member, IEEE

Abstract—We develop a simple analytical model of an ideal

duobinary generating low-pass filter. The model provides impor-
tant physical insight into the design of optically amplified duobinary
systems.We verify the theory with experimental data at 10 Gb/s.
Index Terms—Amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise,
duobinary filter, duobinary modulation, optimum receiver.
Fig. 1. Model optical duobinary system used to derive the ideal duobinary
generating LPF.
I. INTRODUCTION

D UOBINARY modulation, also known as correlative

coding, was originally developed in the era of electronic
communications as an efficient means for reaching the Nyquist
be satisfied by the model optical duobinary system to achieve
optimal ASE noise limited performance [11]:
limit (i.e., transmitting at a bitrate through a channel of band- 1) The optimum optical filter is a matched filter.
width ) [1]. The optical analogue of electrical duobinary 2) The optimum duobinary pulse shape at input to the pho-
modulation has also proven to be an attractive technique in todetector is given by
ultradense wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) because
the relatively narrow duobinary spectrum enables high spectral
(1)
efficiency [2]–[4]. Duobinary modulation is based on creating
a correlation between adjacent bits at the transmitter. The key
element in this process is the duobinary generating filter, ideally where is the bit period.
composed of a simple feed-forward filter with a bit period delay
in one arm followed by a sharp low-pass filter (LPF) having a
The conditions for optimum ASE noise limited duobinary
cutoff at [5]. It is well known that the ideal electronic duobi-
performance are somewhat different from the case of ON–OFF
nary generating filter (actually two filters in cascade) can be well
keying, where receiver performance is in principle independent
approximated by a single LPF with a 3-dB bandwidth of .
of pulse shape as long as a matched filter is used. The additional
Indeed, today, most optical duobinary transmission experiments
requirement of a particular optimal pulse shape for duobinary
typically employ an LPF with bandwidth to generate an
translates into a specific condition on the optimum LPF shape
electrical duobinary signal, which is then used to drive an optical
and bandwidth.
modulator to create the optical duobinary signal [6]–[10].
We derive the transfer function for the ideal duobinary gener-
In this letter, we show that the conventional wisdom on the op-
ating LPF by tracing the frequency domain signal back from re-
timum duobinary generating LPF shape and bandwidth, which
ceiver to transmitter. For simplicity, we work in low-pass signal
comes to us from electronic communications, is incorrect when
representation. The matched optical filter imposes a relationship
applied to optical duobinary. We develop a simple analytical
between and , viz.
model which shows that the ideal LPF shape and bandwidth
are quite different in lightwave systems limited by amplified
spontaneous emission (ASE) noise due to the requirements of
a matched optical filter at the receiver, and a particular optimum (2)
otherwise
duobinary pulse shape. We also present experimental data mea-
sured at 10 Gb/s that provides compelling evidence in confirma- where we dropped an unimportant phase factor (corresponding
tion of the theory. to a simple delay by ) in the matched optical filter transfer
function, and used the normalized Fourier transform of the op-
II. THEORY timum pulse shape in the last step above. Note that the
above expression for also gives us the matched optical
Fig. 1 shows the model optical duobinary system for an opti-
filter shape for duobinary, which is shown in Fig. 2(b) to have a
cally preamplified receiver. The following two conditions must
full-width at half-maximum bandwidth of .
Now, assuming a linear modulator, we can relate to the
Manuscript received October 25, 2005; revised December 1, 2005. electrical duobinary spectrum . For simplicity,
The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of
California, Riverside, CA 92521 USA (e-mail: ilyubomi@ee.ucr.edu). we take a rectangular pulse shape of width for the binary
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LPT.2006.870153 signal , having a corresponding Fourier transform given by
1041-1135/$20.00 © 2006 IEEE
LYUBOMIRSKY AND CHIEN: IDEAL DUOBINARY GENERATING FILTER FOR OPTICALLY AMPLIFIED SYSTEMS
Fig. 2. (a) Predicted ideal LPF amplitude response for a matched optical
filter, and for a suboptimum optical filter with bandwidth much greater than B .
(b) Matched optical filter shape for duobinary.
. Thus, we arrive at an expression for the ideal optical
duobinary generating LPF shape, viz.
(3)
otherwise
The above ideal duobinary LPF shape is plotted in Fig. 2(a).
For comparison, we also plot in the same figure the optimum
LPF shape for duobinary systems employing suboptimum op-
tical filters with bandwidths much greater than (in this case
and follows an shape).
Thus, as seen in Fig. 2(a), we find that in course WDM systems,
where the optical filter bandwidths are generally much greater
than , the optimum LPF bandwidth is . However, a
much better ASE noise limited performance can be achieved
by employing a matched optical filter at the receiver, in which
case Fig. 2(a) shows that the duobinary generating LPF should
have a larger bandwidth . In general, we expect that the
optimum LPF bandwidth is between ,
approaching the upper limit as the optical filter bandwidth is
narrowed to that of a matched filter for duobinary.
III. EXPERIMENT
An experimental realization of the model optical duobinary
system is feasible because the shape of the matched optical
599
Fig. 3. Measured BER equivalent Q-factor as a function of duobinary generat-
ing LPF bandwidth. Several data sets are shown corresponding to different
optical bandwidths 39 (triangles), 10 (squares), and 7 GHz (diamonds).
(a) (b) (c)
Fig. 4. Measured eye diagrams for (a) B = 39 GHz, B = 2:8 GHz;
(b) B = 10 GHz, B = 3:4 GHz; (c) B = 7 GHz, B = 4:5 GHz.
filter for duobinary, shown in Fig. 2(b), can be well approx-
imated by a practical Gaussian shaped optical filter. We em-
ploy a Bessel-Thomson electrical LPF to generate an electrical
duobinary signal from the nonreturn-to-zero binary output of
a 10-Gb/s pulse pattern generator (with pseudorandom binary
sequence pattern length of ). The electrical duobinary
signal, amplified up to 2 V , then drives a zero-chirp lithium
niobate Mach–Zehnder modulator biased at a null to generate
an optical duobinary signal. ASE noise is injected using an er-
bium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) optical preamplifier, with
the optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) controlled by a vari-
able optical attenuator placed in front of the EDFA. The experi-
mental optical filter is based on a free-space grating technology,
obtained by operating a commercial optical spectrum analyzer
(OSA) in a filter mode, and has an approximately Gaussian
shape. The optical filter bandwidth in the experiment can be
adjusted to approximate an optical matched filter (bandwidth
7 GHz at 10 Gb/s) by varying the OSA resolution.
Fig. 3 shows our measurement results for bit-error-rate (BER)
equivalent -factor as a function of LPF electrical bandwidth.
The OSNR is fixed at 14 dB/0.1 nm. Several data sets are shown
corresponding to different optical filter bandwidths. The data
for a relatively wide optical filter with 39-GHz bandwidth
shows an optimum LPF bandwidth at 2.8 GHz. However, a
huge improvement in performance of 3-dB is obtained by
using an optical filter with a bandwidth on the order of
(7–10 GHz). This is attributed to satisfying the matched filter
Criteria 1 of the optimum duobinary system. An additional sig-
nificant performance enhancement of 1.5-dB is obtained by
optimizing the LPF bandwidth to generate a nearly ideal duobi-
nary pulse shape at the receiver in accordance with Criteria 2 of
the optimum duobinary system. Measured eye diagrams corre-
sponding to optimum LPF bandwidths for each optical filter are
shown in Fig. 4. The overall best experimental performance is
600
Fig. 5. Comparison of ideal theoretical duobinary pulse shape with the measured optimum pulse shape. The measured intensity for an isolated pulse, captured
from the optical bit stream at the receiver for the case of 7-GHz optical filter and 4-GHz LPF, is compared with y (t) from (1).
achieved with an optical filter of 7-GHz bandwidth, and an LPF
bandwidth of 4 to 4.5 GHz. Thus, the experimental results are
in very good agreement with the theory developed in Section II.
To verify that we have indeed achieved a nearly optimum
duobinary pulse shape at the receiver, we captured an iso-
lated pulse from the optical bit stream at the receiver using
a high-speed digital sampling scope (DCA). The measured
duobinary pulse shape for the case of 7-GHz optical filter
bandwidth, and 4-GHz LPF bandwidth is shown in Fig. 5. For
comparison, we also plot the ideal theoretical duobinary pulse
from (1) (actually we show since the DCA measures
the intensity, while corresponds to field amplitude). The
main lobe of the measured pulse shape agrees well with the
shape of the ideal theoretical pulse, both spreading out across
two bits as expected for a duobinary correlation. However, the
measured pulse also exhibits some high-frequency oscillations,
most likely due to the nonideal nature of the devices used in
the experiment (i.e., the experimental optical filter is only an
approximation to a matched filter, and the Bessel-Thomson
LPF shape is not an exact match for the optimum LPF shape).
IV. CONCLUSION
We have developed an analytical model for an ideal duobi-
nary generating LPF, and verify the model accuracy with exper-
imental data at 10 Gb/s. While previous computer simulation
based studies have already shed much light on the optimum LPF
shape and bandwidth [11]–[13], an analytical model can give
additional physical insight. For example, we obtain a simple and
elegant explanation for why the optimum LPF bandwidth should
be chosen near for duobinary systems with optical filter
bandwidths approaching . The model can be easily gen-
eralized to include a pulse shaping optical filter placed at the
transmitter [14]. The optimum LPF shape is simply modified
by in this case.
Finally, we note that this work focuses on the ideal duobi-
nary generating LPF for ASE noise limited systems, and is most
applicable to long-haul optically amplified transmission sys-
tems employing dispersion-compensating modules. In general,
a duobinary system optimized for ASE noise limited perfor-
mance may not obtain the best dispersion tolerance. The trade-
IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 18, NO. 4, FEBRUARY 15, 2006
j j
offs between ASE noise and dispersion tolerance, as well as ex-
perimental results, are discussed more fully in [14].
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