EE 230 Optical Fiber Communications Spring 2004

Description
Components and system design of optical fiber communication. Types of fibers, how
they work, phenomena that degrade signals and how to mitigate them, light sources,
detectors, amplifiers, networks, and systems.

Lectures
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:00-11:45 a.m., Crown College room 105

Final Exam
Tuesday, June 8, 7:30-10:30 p.m., Crown College room 105

Instructor
Christopher R. Moylan
223 Baskin Engineering Building
9-5453 (650) 723-9518
cmoylan@soe.ucsc.edu cmoylan@stanford.edu
Office hours: Thursdays, 2:00-4:00 p.m.

Textbook
K. Iizuka, Elements of Photonics, Volume II, Wiley (2002). The textbook has problems
and solutions for each chapter. Students are expected to solve these problems on their
own, and come to office hours for help if the solutions are unclear.

Two additional textbooks are on one-day reserve at the Science and Engineering Library:

G. Keiser, Optical Fiber Communications, third edition, McGraw-Hill (2000).

G.P. Agrawal, Fiber-Optic Communication Systems, third edition, Wiley (2002).

Required Web Reading

Students are required to sign up for the weekly version of the Light Reading newsletter,
by going to the www.lightreading.com web site and following the instructions. The
articles in this weekly web publication will be discussed in class on Tuesdays.

Graded Work
There will be no midterm exam in this class. The course grade will be based on four
homework assignments (40%), a final project (30%) and the final exam (30%). The final
project will be a paper on a topic chosen by the student with consent of the instructor. It
will be a paper of approximately ten pages explaining the physics and engineering of the
topic in detail.

1
Course Schedule

Readings are in Iizuka except where noted otherwise: K=Keiser, A=Agrawal.

Date Lecture topic Reading, work due

T 3/30 Course logistics, history of fiber optics K ch 1
Th 4/1 Types of fibers, geometric optics 11.1,11.9-11.11
T 4/6 Modes in fibers 11.2, 11.3
Th 4/8 Dispersion 11.6, 11.7
T 4/13 Nonlinear effects in fibers A 2.6; Homework 1 due
Th 4/15 Scattering and absorption K ch 3
T 4/20 Amplifiers, part 1 13.1-13.7
Th 4/22 Amplifiers, part 2 13.8-13.13
T 4/27 Light sources, part 1 14.1-14.8; Homework 2 due
Th 4/29 Light sources, part 2 14.9-14.16
T 5/4 Detectors and receivers, part 1 ch 12, K ch 6
Th 5/6 Detectors and receivers, part 2 16.4,16.5, K ch 7
T 5/11 Dispersion compensation A ch 7; Homework 3 due
Th 5/13 Time-division multiplexing systems 16.3, A8.4
T 5/18 Wavelength-division multiplexing components K ch 10
Th 5/20 Wavelength-division multiplexing systems A ch 8
T 5/25 System optimization 16.6; Homework 4 due
T 6/8 Final exam Written project due

Note that there will be no lectures on Th 5/27, T 6/2, and Th 6/4. During this week and a
half, students are expected to be working on their final projects.