The Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University will purchase optical and electronic test and measurement equipment which will be dedicated to support research in engineering. This equipment will be used for several research projects, including, in particular, coherent wavelength- division multiplexed (WDM) networks, optical interconnects, and local- area networks. A four terminal WDM network utilizing 3Gb/s per station phase-shift-keying for a total throughput of 12 Gb/s will be contracted. The system will be used to investigate the advantages and limitations of key technologies important to the development of WDM interconnects and local area networks. Three areas will be investigated: (1) the advantages and limitations of the phase-shift-keyed modulation; (2) the impact of various modulation and coding techniques of performance degradations due to fiber nonlinearities; (3) the advantages and limitations of polarization maintaining fiber in WDM interconnects; and (4) network level protocols for high speed interconnects.
