Ultrahigh-speed OTDM transmission beyond 1 tera bit-per-second using a femtosecond pulse train

Progress on a single wavelength channel OTDM terabit/s transmission is described. In particular, we focus on 1.28 Tbit/s OTDM transmission over 70 km which we realized recently. A pre-chirping technique using a high speed phase modulator is emphasized to simultaneously compensate for third- and fourth-order dispersion. The input pulse width was 380 fs, and the pulse broadening after a 70 km transmission was as small as 20 fs. All 128 channels time-division-demultiplexed to 10 Gbit/s had a bit error rate of less than 1 × 10^-9, in which we employed a lot of new technique for pulse generation, dispersion compensation and demultiplexing. These techniques help pave the path for OTDM technology of the 21 century.