To summarize, all of the above-described transmitter configurations suffer
mainly from limitations of driver amplifier and modulator. The realized electronic
multiplexers have excellent performance, which is a clear indication that all the
required signal processing in a transmitter can be realized with today’s advanced
IC processing technology. The bottlenecks are the bandwidth and output power of
the driver amplifiers and/or bandwidth and required V
pi
of the commercially
available modulators.
As the research on 100-Gbit/s transmission systems has just started and a first
100-Gbit/s subsyste m has been demonstrated at ECOC 2005 we can expect that the
maturity of the required components could be achieved within few years.
Up to now, only a limited