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distortion in a gain-saturated value for transparency, the SOA functions as a saturable absorber
(hereafter called a semiconductor waveguide saturable absorber, or
semiconductor optical amplifier using a SWSA), which has low transmittance for low power input and high
semiconductor saturable absorber transmittance for high power input because of carrier excitation by the
input light. The carrier transition occurs with a duration nearly equal to
K. Inoue the carrier lifetime, and the transmittance of a semiconductor saturable
absorber does not instantly respond to changes in the input power. For
A technique to compensate waveform distortion induced in a gain- an intense rectangular input pulse, for example, the output from an
saturated semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) is proposed and SWSA behaves as shown in Fig. 1b. The leading part suffers large
demonstrated. A saturable absorber, which is actually an SOA biased
below the transparency current, is placed after an SOA. The loss
absorption and the later part approaches a loss-saturated condition.
dynamics of the absorber compensate the SOA gain dynamics and a
less distorted signal can be output. The dynamic behaviours of a gain-saturated SOA and an SWSA are
opposite, as shown in Fig. 1a and b. Thus, when an SWSA is placed
Introduction: Semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) have been after an SOA, waveform distortion induced in the SOA can be
studied for lightwave communications. While they have advantages, compensated in the SWSA, and a less distorted signal is output from
such as compactness and the ability to be integrated with other opti-cal the combination of SOA and SWSA, as shown in Fig. 1c. Note that Fig.
devices, a disadvantage is waveform distortion due to gain satu-ration. 1c is not a simple multiplication of Fig. 1a and b, since the SWSA
When an intense optical signal is input into an SOA at a bit rate response is basically nonlinear and a simple multiplication idea based
comparable to (or higher than) the gain response time, wave-form on linear concepts cannot be applied to this situation.
distortion is incurred in the output signal [1 4].
This Letter proposes and demonstrates a technique to compensate
waveform distortion in a gain-saturated SOA. A second SOA biased
below the tranparency current is placed after an SOA with high gain.
Under this bias condition, the second SOA functions as a saturable
Fig. 2 Experimental setup
absorber, which has a dynamic response complementary to that in a
gain-saturated SOA and can compensate the waveform distortion
induced in the first SOA. Experiment: An experiment was carried out to confirm the above
mechanism, and its configuration is shown in Fig. 2. Two polarisa-tion-
sensitive SOA modules (1.5m band) were prepared and directly
connected with polarisation-maintaining fibres. The first-stage SOA
was biased at 100mA, giving an unsaturated module gain of 14dB. The
second-stage SOA had a transparency current (at which the chip gain is
0dB) of 14mA. This SOA was biased at 10.3mA and functioned as an
SWSA. The unsaturated chip loss of the SWSA was 6dB.
References