Transmission performance through cascaded 1-nm arrayed waveguide multiplexers at 10 Gb/s

The transmission properties of cascaded arrayed waveguide multiplexers are examined in a recirculating loop experiment. We show that a cascade of 40 multiplexers each with 3-dB bandwidth of /spl sim/1 nm can be passed penalty-free at 10 Gb/s. Furthermore, we show that the allowable fluctuation of the center frequency for a 10 Gb/s signal is reduced to 24 GHz at bit-error rate (BER)=10/sup -9/ for a concatenation of 40 multiplexers.