The equipment requested is a fast-pulse mode-locked laser system. this system will enable research on fast time division multiaccess techniques for all-optical networks. All-optical network architectures use optical signal processing for clock generation, modulation, encoding, decoding, protocol-handling and threshold detection. Optical bandwidth- expansion protocols such as spread spectrum and time division have already been demonstrated in our laboratory, and a 12.5 Gbps network has been implemented that accommodates 125 users. Future research will explore the fundamental limits of optical networks with optical pulse compression, moving toward terabit/sec optical communications. They will use optical processing to implement higher layers in the networks. The unique virtues of optical processing, such as speed and parallelism, should lead to unique network architectures with capabilities far beyond present-day systems.
