Penalty-free transmission at 10 Gbit/s through 40 cascaded 1-nm arrayed waveguide multiplexers

Cascaded optical add-drop multiplexers (OADM) and optical cross connects (OXC) are key components in optical wavelength-division multiplex networks. OADMs with filtering of the passing signals and OXCs can be constructed by the use of wavelength-division multiplexers. Cascadability of multiplexers is therefore vital for the network performance. The actual transfer function of multiplexers is important, because the available end-to-end bandwidth between connected nodes in optical networks with cascades of OXCs and OADMs is given by the product of the transfer functions. In this paper, we demonstrate the cascadability of arrayed waveguide (AWG) multiplexers in a recirculating loop experiment at 10 Gbit/s and show that up to 40 multiplexers each with a 3-dB bandwidth of 1 nm and sharp roll-off characteristics can be passed penalty free