Fiber-Optic Communications Systems, Third Edition. Govind P. Agrawal Copyright 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

. ISBNs: 0-471-21571-6 (Hardback); 0-471-22114-7 (Electronic)

Appendix A

System of Units
The international system of units (known as the SI, short for Syst e ` me International) is used in this book. The three fundamental units in the SI are meter (m), second (s), and kilogram (kg). A prex can be added to each of them to change its magnitude by a multiple of 10. Mass units are rarely required in this book. Most common measures of distance used are km (10 3 m) and Mm (10 6 m). On the other hand, common time measures are ns (10 9 s), ps (1012 s), and fs (10 15 s). Other common units in this book are Watt (W) for optical power and W/m 2 for optical intensity. They can be related to the fundamental units through energy because optical power represents the rate of energy ow (1 W = 1 J/s). The energy can be expressed in several other ways using E = h = kB T = mc2 , where h is the Planck constant, k B is the Boltzmann constant, and c is the speed of light. The frequency is expressed in hertz (1 Hz = 1 s 1 ). Of course, because of the large frequencies associated with the optical waves, most frequencies in this book are expressed in GHz or THz. In the design of optical communication systems the optical power can vary over several orders of magnitude as the signal travels from the transmitter to the receiver. Such large variations are handled most conveniently using decibel units, abbreviated dB, commonly used by engineers in many different elds. Any ratio R can be converted into decibels by using the general denition R (in dB) = 10 log10 R. (A.1)

The logarithmic nature of the decibel allows a large ratio to be expressed as a much smaller number. For example, 10 9 and 109 correspond to 90 dB and 90 dB, respectively. Since R = 1 corresponds to 0 dB, ratios smaller than 1 are negative in the decibel system. Furthermore, negative ratios cannot be written using decibel units. The most common use of the decibel scale occurs for power ratios. For instance, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of an optical or electrical signal is given by SNR = 10 log10 (PS /PN ), (A.2)

where PS and PN are the signal and noise powers, respectively. The ber loss can also be expressed in decibel units by noting that the loss corresponds to a decrease in the 518

APPENDIX A. SYSTEM OF UNITS

519

optical power during transmission and thus can be expressed as a power ratio. For example, if a 1-mW signal reduces to 1 W after transmission over 100 km of ber, the 30-dB loss over the entire ber span translates into a loss of 0.3 dB/km. The same technique can be used to dene the insertion loss of any component. For instance, a 1-dB loss of a ber connector implies that the optical power is reduced by 1 dB (by about 20%) when the signal passes through the connector. The bandwidth of an optical lter is dened at the 3-dB point, corresponding to 50% reduction in the signal power. The modulation bandwidth of ight-emitting diodes (LEDs) in Section 3.2 and of semiconductor lasers in Section 3.5 is also dened at the 3-dB point, at which the modulated powers drops by 50%. Since the losses of all components in a ber-optic communication systems are expressed in dB, it is useful to express the transmitted and received powers also by using a decibel scale. This is achieved by using a derived unit, denoted as dBm and dened as power , (A.3) power (in dBm) = 10 log 10 1 mW where the reference level of 1 mW is chosen simply because typical values of the transmitted power are in that range (the letter m in dBm is a reminder of the 1-mW reference level). In this decibel scale for the absolute power, 1 mW corresponds to 0 dBm, whereas powers below 1 mW are expressed as negative numbers. For example, a 10- W power corresponds to 20 dBm. The advantage of decibel units becomes clear when the power budget of lightwave systems is considered in Chapter 5. Because of the logarithmic nature of the decibel scale, the power budget can be made simply by subtracting various losses from the transmitter power expressed in dBm units.