Fast PMD penalty measurement using polarization scrambling

Considering the effort that is necessary to keep worst case coupling conditions during differential group delay (DGD) penalty measurement, we propose a fast measurement of penalties for 1/sup st/ order DGD. This test can be used to approximately calculate the expected outage probability of a device under test. This method gives quick access to an important parameter for performance characterization. Furthermore, scrambling has shown to produce much more stable results as slow variations of the polarization, for example when using PMD-emulators based on free space optics, are eliminated.