Journal Paper

Recently, a tunable fiber Bragg grating (FBG) was developed by using stress-responsive colloidal crystals. In this paper, we have simulated the application of these nanoparticles into the super-structured fiber Bragg grating (SSFBG) written with perfect sequences derived from a short maximal-length sequence. A tunable SSFBG will be available to overcome the prohibitive temperature variation of the optical codecs. Nevertheless, we presented a method to implement coherent time spreading optical code-division multiple-access (OCDMA) where a unique code (or perfect sequence) can be reused and mixed with different wavelengths to obtain a tunable wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) system. In order to maximize the binary throughput, we have selected a unique short maximal-length sequence composed of 7 chips that can be tuned with 7 different optical wavelengths. We found thousands of different tunable combinations that presented power contrast ratios (P/C) higher than 12 dB. When a WDM-OCDMA system used 2 different combinations simultaneously, the perfect binary detection with error correction codes was achieved successfully. The tunable SSFBG with colloidal crystals will be a simple and good alternative choice for fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) communications.