The quality of transmitted signal is easy to be impacted due to the fiber Kerr nonlinearity, which results in the difficulty in increasing transmission capacity and speed of single mode fiber (SMF) based optical fiber communication systems. However, a new research by University of California at San Diego (UCSD) has shown that the technology based on optical frequency comb (OFC) combined with digital signal processing can improve the transmission performance significantly. This manifests that this OFC-based technology can be treated as a breakthrough of the nonlinear Shannon limit. This paper mainly relates to the topic of OFC, including the definition, generation methods, typical applications in information and communication systems, and the OFC-based crossed applications in other related physical scientific fields. Meanwhile, the trends of OFC technology have also been discussed.

optical fiber communication  /  nonlinear Shannon limit  /  optical frequency comb  /  signal processing