IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 19, NO.

6, MARCH 15, 2007 435

Grating Design of Oppositely Chirped FBGs for

Pulse Shaping
Miguel A. Preciado, Víctor García-Muñoz, and Miguel A. Muriel, Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract—In this letter, we analyze and develop the required

basis for a precise grating design in a scheme based on two
oppositely chirped fiber Bragg gratings, and apply it in several
examples which are numerically simulated. We obtain the inter-
esting result that the broader bandwidth of the reshaped pulse,
the shorter gratings required.
Index Terms—Gratings, optical fiber dispersion, optical filters,
optical pulse shaping.

I. INTRODUCTION

O PTICAL pulse shaping and manipulation are critical fea-

tures for ultrafast optics, playing a central role in the area
of optical communication. In this letter, we focus our attention
Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of the system.
in optical pulse shaping using a scheme based on two oppo-
sitely chirped fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs). As it can be seen
in Fig. 1, this scheme includes two chirped FBGs connected by
index modulation, is the normalized apodization function,
optical circulators. Note that we can use two circulators of three
is the fundamental period of the grating, describes the
ports or a single circulator of four ports. The first FBG, FBG , is
additional phase variation (chirp), and is the spatial
the spectral shaper, and provides the spectral response for pulse
coordinate over the grating, with the length of the grating.
shaping, and the second one, FBG , cancels the dispersion in-
In the following, we consider a constant average refractive
troduced by the first grating. Obviously, the order of the FBGs
index , where is the effective
can be arbitrarily selected.
refractive index of the propagation mode. The additional phase
This scheme has been previously proposed, and experimen-
variation can be expressed as , where
tally demonstrated in [1] and [2]. In [1], phase-shifts are intro-
represents the chirp factor, and can be calculated from [3]
duced in the shaper FBG to generate spectral-phase-encoded bit.
In [2], a bandpass Gaussian FBG optical filter in which the band- (2)
width can be continuously adjusted is presented. We have found
the necessity of exhaustively analyzing and developing the re- where is the first-order dispersion coef-
quired basis to make a precise design. Three examples of design ficient. Moreover, the length of the grating can be obtained
are developed, with corresponding numerical simulations. from the following expression [3]:
II. THEORY
(3)
Suppose a linearly chirped FGB with reflected spectral re-
sponse , where is the angular where is the light vacuum speed, and is the grating band-
frequency, is the reflectivity, and is the phase. The width. It is well known that when a chirped FBG introduces a
refractive index can be written as high enough dispersion, the apodization profile maps its spec-
tral response [4]. It can be deduced that the dispersion condition
(1) of real-time Fourier transform [3] can be applied. Effectively, if
this condition is met, we have the same envelope in both the
where represents the average refractive index of the spectral response and the impulse response. This condition can
propagation mode, describes the maximum refractive be expressed as

(4)
Manuscript received November 21, 2006; revised January 16, 2007. This
work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Educacion y Ciencia under where is the temporal length of the inverse Fourier trans-
Project Plan Nacional de I+D+I, TEC2004-04754-C03-02. form of the FBG spectral response without the dispersive term,
The authors are with ETSI Telecomunicación, Universidad Politécnica de
Madrid (UPM), 28040 Madrid, Spain (e-mail: miguel.preciado@tfo.upm.es). which is approximately equal to the temporal length of the
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LPT.2007.892901 pulse reshaped. Furthermore, in the weak-grating limit (Born
1041-1135/$25.00 © 2007 IEEE
436 IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 19, NO. 6, MARCH 15, 2007

approximation), the apodization profile maps the impulse re- In the fist example, we suppose that each Gaussian
sponse envelope, so it also maps the spectral response. Notice input pulse has an full-width at half-maximum (FWHM)
that this high dispersion condition is not required if the FBG of 0.7496 ps (spectral standard deviation of Thz),
response is eigenfunction of the continuous Fourier transform and the total desired width for the reshaped triangular
(e.g., Gaussian and Hermite-Gaussian functions), because then pulse is 10 ps. Thus, the spectral function for the input
the apodization profile maps its spectral and impulse response pulse and output pulse are proportional to
for any dispersion value. From (3) and (4) we can deduce and , respectively,
where rad/s and rad/s.
(5) Notice that and , as well as all the spectral func-
tions in the following, are described as analytical signals (only
where TBP is approximately equal to the time- defined at ). We consider a band of interest of
bandwidth product of the desired pulse. So from (5) we obtain 2 THz centered at . The
that, for a given desired pulse shape, the shorter temporal length spectral response of the system meets the following condition:
of the pulse, the broader its spectrum, and the shorter minimum
length of the grating. The bandwidth fixes the product chirp-
length of the grating and the shorter temporal length of the
pulse, the less dispersion required, the shorter length and the
greater chirp of the grating. (9)
When this scheme is used for a CDMA approach similar to
where and are the spectral response and the
[1], we can use (5) with TBP , where TBP is
phase of the system, , , , are the
the time-bandwidth product of one spectral chip, and number
reflectivity and phase of both FBGs. Thus, we obtain
of chips, so . In the case
of designing a bandwidth tunable system as used in [2], we must
(10)
apply (5) with the minimum tunable bandwidth, . So,
we obtain . Note that this
condition was not required in [2] since, as it have been said, a We suppose an ideal flat-top response for the FBG , so the
Gaussian response does not require a minimum dispersion con- shape of the reflectivity is influenced by FBG solely, and we
dition. find that
If condition (4) is met and the FBG operate in the weak-
grating limit (Born approximation), we can obtain the apodiza- (11)
tion profile which corresponds to a desired reflectivity
[5], that can be written as where is designed to get a maximum reflectivity
value of 10% at . Using expression (4), we have the
dispersion parameter of FBG , s rad,
(6) where have been used ps. We choose
s rad. Moreover, using (8) for FBG with
where is central angular frequency and is related to the (11) at (where is imposed), we ob-
apodization function as tain , , and
nm. Also, we make use of (2) to calculate the
(7) values rad/m . From (3), we obtain
cm, where have been assumed.
where the sign of is equal to the sign of . In the case of high Using (7), (8), and (11) we derive
reflectivity an approximate function [6] must be applied over
the desired reflectivity . In particular, here a logarithmic-
based function is proposed

(8)
(12)

Additionally, the FBG must be designed as a dispersion

III. EXAMPLES AND RESULTS
As instance we design three examples in which Gaussian
pulses from a short pulse source are reshaped in triangular ones.
We develop exhaustively the first example, and more briefly the
second and third ones. For all the examples, we assume a car-
rier frequency of 193 THz, and an effective refractive
index for FBG .
compensator with s rad, and
a flat top response in the band of interest. Fig. 2(a) shows
the output pulse of the system in temporal domain obtained
from numerical simulation. Notice that it exhibits the desired
triangular shape.
As a second example, suppose we have the same signals as
in the first example, but we intentionally choose a dispersion
PRECIADO et al.: GRATING DESIGN OF OPPOSITELY CHIRPED FBGs FOR PULSE SHAPING
Fig. 2. Simulation results. Plots (a) and (b) show the temporal domain results:
(a) input pulse (dashed line) and output pulse for first (solid line) and second
(dotted line) examples; (b) input pulse (dashed line) and output pulse (solid line)
for third example. Plots (c) and (d) show the FBG spectral response: (c) ideal
(solid line) and simulated for first (undistingable from ideal) and second (dotted
line) examples; (d) ideal (solid line) and simulated for third example (dotted
line).
value s rad, which is not large enough to
meet (4). Imposing again a maximum reflectivity of 10%, we
obtain , ,
nm, rad/m . The apodiza-
tion profile is again described by (12), with cm.
Fig. 2(a) shows the output pulse of the system in temporal do-
main obtained by numerical simulation. As it can be seen, we
obtain neither the desired shape nor width in the output pulse.
Finally, as a third example, we assume we have scaled ver-
sions of the same signals (ten times shorter), so we have an input
Gaussian pulse with an FWHM of 74.96 fs, and a desired re-
shaped triangular pulse with a total width of 1 ps. Following
the former process, we obtain s rad,
and we choose s rad. Imposing again
a maximum reflectivity 10%, we obtain
, , nm,
rad/m . The apodization profile is described by (12), with
cm. As predicted by (5), compared with the first ex-
ample, we have a ten times shorter length for a ten times broader
spectrum. Fig. 2(b) shows the output pulse of the system in tem-
poral domain obtained by simulation, where we get the desired
triangular shape.
437
Fig. 2(c) and (d) compares the simulated and ideal spectral
response of FBG . As can be seen, in the first and third exam-
ples, the ideal and simulated responses are very similar (undis-
tinguible for first example). However, in the second example,
FBG does not map properly the spatial profile on the spectral
response because of a bad choice of grating length.
In our simulations, we have supposed ideal cancellation of
dispersions of both FBGs. In practice, this requires a careful
monitoring of the chirp profile of each grating to avoid excessive
phase ripple. This has been achieved in [1], even with tunable
chirp in [2]. Considerations about dispersion and phase ripple
tolerance can be found in [2] and [7].
IV. CONCLUSION
We have developed a theoretical basis to design a scheme
based on two oppositely chirped FBGs. The numerically simu-
lated examples show how to use it, and validate this theoretical
work. We have deduced that the broader the handled spectrum,
the shorter the minimum length of the grating, which can be ob-
served in the examples results. Note also that the length of the
grating is not fixed, so it is possible to set a length to obtain the
most realizable technological parameters.
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