Abstract

Semiconductor optical amplifiers are strong candidates to replace traditional erbium-doped-fibre-amplifiers in future all-optical networks by virtue of their proven functional capabilities, in addition to gain. They are also smaller, cheaper and easier to integrate than fibre amplifiers. This study summarizes the gain quality of the semiconductor optical amplifier with varying effects such as input power, bias current and wavelength and data rate. The results reported herein show high quality gain, coupled with accept ably low noise figure values.

Keywords:

Erbium-Doped-Fibre-Amplifier (EDFA), Noise Figure (NF), Quality factor (Q), Semiconductor Optical Amplifier (SOA),

References

1. Aw, E.T., T. Lin, A. Wonfor, R.V. Penty and I.H. White, 2007. Multi-stage SOA switches fabrics: 4x40Gb/s packet switching and fault tolerance. Proceeding of Optical Fiber Communication and the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC 2007), pp: 1-3.
   
2. Bogoni, A., L. Poti, C. Porzi, M. Scaffardi, P. Ghelfi and F. Ponzini, 2004. Modeling and measurement of noisy SOA dynamics for ultrafast applications. IEEE J. Sel. Top. Quant., 10(1): 197-205.
   CrossRef    
3. Connelly, M.J., 2003. Semiconductor amplifiers and their applications (Invited paper). Proceeding of 3rd Spanish Meeting of Optoelectronics (OPTOEL'03). Madrid, Spain.
   
4. Guo, L.Q. and M.J. Connelly, 2005. All-optical and gate using nonlinear polarization rotation in a bulk semiconductor optical amplifier. Proceeding of Optical Amplifiers and their Applications Topical Meeting on CD-ROM (The Optical Society of America, Washington, DC, 2005), SuB9, ISBN: 1-55752-7903.
   CrossRef    
5. Leuthold, J., C.H. Joyner, B. Mikkelsen, G. Raybon, J.L. Pleumeekers, B.I. Miller, K. Dreyer and C.A. Burrus, 2000. 100Gbit/s all-optical wavelength conversion with integrated SOA delayed-interference configuration. Electron. Lett., 36(13): 1129-1130.
   CrossRef    
6. Mahad, F.D., A.S. Supa'at, S.M. Idrus and D.I. Forsyth, 2010. Optimizing the performance of semiconductor optical amplifier for amplification and switching functions. Proceeding of the Indonesia-Malaysia Microwave Antenna Conference, ISSN: 2086-8308.
   
7. Nakamura, S., K. Tajima and Y. Sugimoto, 1994. Experimental investigation on high-speed switching characteristics of a novel symmetric Mach-Zehnder all-optical switch. Appl. Phys. Lett., 65: 283-385.
   CrossRef    
8. Pleros, N., G.T. Kanellos, C. Bintjas, A. Hatziefremidis and H. Avramopoulos, 2004. Optical power limiter using a saturated SOA-based interferometric switch. IEEE Photonic. Tech. L., 16(10).
   
9. Vaughn, M.D. and D.J. Blumenthal, 1997. All-optical updating of subcarrier encoded packet headers with simultaneous wavelength conversion of baseband payload in semiconductor optical amplifiers. IEEE Photonic. Tech. L., 9(6): 827-829.
   CrossRef    

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.