title: Performance limits of delay lines based on optical amplifiers.
abstract: The performance of tunable buffers based on optical amplifiers and its improvement by use of gain flattening are analyzed. A simple analytical expression is obtained indicating that the gain required to attain tunable storage of N bits increases nonlinearly with N and reaches unrealistically high values for N>5. A comparison with other types of optical delay line is made.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA. jakek@jhu.edu
authors.forename: Jacob B
authors.initials: JB
authors.lastname: Khurgin