Feasibility of optical CDMA using spectral encoding by acoustically tunable optical filters

The authors demonstrate the applicability of low-drive-power acoustically tunable optical filters (ATOF) for spectral encoding of wideband optical sources. A simple addressability in optical code division multiple access (CDMA) systems can be achieved using this approach, also allowing source-spectrum equalisation to increase the encoded bandwidth. We show experimentally the capability of ATOF to select 30 wavelength channels simultaneously, and its potential for selecting even several hundreds, making possible the spectral encoding/decoding of large code sequences