Adiabatically tunable optical delay lines and their performance limitations

A simple tunable optical delay line based on adiabatic zone folding in coupled resonator lines is proposed, and its performance is analyzed. The results, valid for all adiabatically tunable optical buffers based on resonators, indicate that, while at low to medium bit rates the performance is improved substantially compared with that of the fixed delay lines, this improvement vanishes for high bit rates and large storage capacities.