EE 230 Optical Fiber Communications Winter 2006

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, 2:00-3:45 p.m., Social Sciences 2 room 167

Final Exam
Monday, March 20, 4:00-7:00 p.m.

Instructor
Christopher R. Moylan
239A Engineering 2
9-5453 (650) 723-9518
cmoylan@soe.ucsc.edu cmoylan@stanford.edu
Office hours: Thursdays, 4:00-6:00 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. Each student will give
a report on one Light Reading article during the quarter.

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 (20%), the Light Reading report (10%),
and the final exam (30%). The final project will cover a topic chosen by the student with
consent of the instructor. It will be an in-class oral report explaining the physics and
engineering of the topic in detail.

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Course Schedule

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

Date Lecture topic Reading, work due
Th 1/5 Course logistics, history of fiber optics K ch 1
T 1/10 Types of fibers, geometric optics 11.1,11.9-11.11
Th 1/12 Modes in fibers 11.2, 11.3
T 1/17 Dispersion 11.6, 11.7
Th 1/19 Nonlinear effects in fibers A 2.6; Homework 1 due
T 1/24 Scattering and absorption K ch 3
Th 1/26 Amplifiers, part 1 13.1-13.7
T 1/31 Amplifiers, part 2 13.8-13.13
Th 2/2 Light sources, part 1 14.1-14.8; Homework 2 due
T 2/7 Light sources, part 2 14.9-14.16
Th 2/9 Detectors and receivers, part 1 ch 12, K ch 6
T 2/14 Detectors and receivers, part 2 16.4,16.5, K ch 7
Th 2/16 Dispersion compensation A ch 7; Homework 3 due
T 2/21 Time-division multiplexing systems 16.1-16.3, A8.4
Th 2/23 Wavelength-division multiplexing components K ch 10
T 2/28 Wavelength-division multiplexing systems A ch 8
Th 3/2 System optimization 16.6; Homework 4 due
T 3/7 Project presentations
Th 3/9 No lecture
T 3/14 No lecture
Th 3/16 Project presentations
M 3/20 Final exam, 4:00-7:00 p.m.



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