Continuous delay tunability using a combination of three types of fiber Bragg gratings, wavelength conversion, and wavelength multicasting with a frequency comb

We experimentally demonstrate a delay subsystem that utilizes a combination of three types of fiber-Bragg gratings (FBGs), wavelength conversion, and wavelength multicasting using a frequency comb source. While the linearly chirped FBG together with a channelized dispersion compensation one, provide the continuous delay, an array of standard FBGs utilizes the multicast copies to extend the delay in steps determined by the array geometry. Following the characterization of the group-delay dispersion performance of the FBGs, a 10 Gbaud quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) signal is continuously delayed by 2.2 ns and discretely delayed in 3 steps of ∼2 ns, to provide a total gap-less delay of 8.1 ns. The delayed signal is finally recovered to its original wavelength with an optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) penalty of ∼2.3 dB. Furthermore, we show that the penalty can be reduced to 1.2 dB after equalization and report delaying a 20 Gbaud QPSK signal. The demonstrated high-quality delay performance is quite scalable. The continuous delay can be extended to tens of nanoseconds, limited only by the performance of the used components, while the discrete delay is determined by the number of multicast copies and propagation distance between the reflections in the array of FBGs.