Analysis and characterization of semiconductor optical amplifiers for application in photonic switching networks

Abstract

Results and analysis of semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA) are presented as applied to Photonic switching nodes in OPS/OBS future optical networks. Detailed characterization is provided to investigate physical constraints of optical power, gain and noise figure of SOAs. Two different lasers, one external cavity tunable laser and one DFB laser, verify that although the SOA gain is not significantly sensitive to input source a clear difference on the noise figure (NF) is observed. Another important result is that by limiting the average number of hops in the network accumulated ASE power from the amplifiers should not impair signal quality.