In this paper we review the stretched-pulse principle and discuss its inherent advantages for ultrashort pulse generation and transmission. An analytic theory of the stretched-pulse fiber laser is presented and shown to be in good agreement with experimental results. An extension of the stretched-pulse theory is applied to both fiber lasers and dispersion-allocated soliton transmission and then compared to numerical results. We also discuss the design and operation of an environmentally stable stretched-pulse fiber laser.

FM laser operation of a Ti:sapphire laser is studied experimentally for the first time with an internal phase modulator. We obtained extremely wide FM sidebands of 8 THz width whose phase modulation index was 25,000 rad at a modulation frequency of 160 MHz.

The modular and growable photonic ATM switch architecture described in this paper uses both time-division and wavelength-division multiplexing technologies, so the switch capacity can be expanded in both the time and frequency domains. It uses a new implementation of output buffering scheme that overcomes the bottleneck in receiving and storing concurrent ultra fast optical cells. The capacity in one stage of a switch with this architecture can be increased from 32 gigabits per second to several terabits per second in a modular fashion. The proposed switch structure with output channel grouping can greatly reduce the amount of hardware and still guarantee the cell sequence.

This paper is a study on the behavioral aspects of the input buffer limiting scheme whose basic feature is to award priority to the transit messages over the input messages so that congestion does not develop in the network. The numerical method employed in the analysis is that proposed in Ref.(7). The performance aspects are studied for different buffer capacities, different message handling capacities and different levels of reservation for transit traffic. The numerical method indicates that thrashing occurs at low levels of reservation for the transit messages, irrespective of the buffer size or the processor capacities of the node. This observation is supported by simulation results. With reference to the state-space of the model of our study, the congestion aspects are related to two Liapunov functions. Under the domain of one of the Liapunov functions, the evolution of the perturbed system is towards a congested state whereas, under the domain of the other Liapunov function, the evolution is towards a congestion-free state. Regardless of the configuration, it is found that the fundamental characteristic of the congestion under the input buffer limiting scheme is the characteristic of a fold catastrophe. In the systems with insufficient level of reservation for the transit traffic, the performance degradation appears to be inevitable, irrespective of the capacities of the nodal processor and output channel processor, and the size of the buffer pool. Given such an inevitability, the active life of a node under a typical node configuration is studied by simulation. A suitable performance index is suggested to assess the performance of deadlock-prone nodes.