Abstract
This chapter discusses the operating principals, design, fabrication, and performance characteristics of InP-based semiconductor amplifiers. Semiconductor optical amplifiers can be classified into two categories which includes the Fabry-Perot (FP) amplifier and the traveling wave (TW) amplifier. A FP amplifier has considerable reflectivity at the input and output ends, resulting in resonant amplification between the end mirrors. A FP amplifier exhibits very large gain at wavelengths corresponding to the longitudinal modes of the cavity. The TW amplifier, by contrast, has negligible reflectivity at each end, resulting in signal amplification during a single pass. The principal feature of the buried facet optical amplifiers relative to antireflective (AR)-coated cleaved facet devices is a polarization-independent reduction in mode reflectivity due to the buried facet, resulting in better control in achieving polarization-independent gain. Cross-phase modulation (XPM) in a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) in an interferometric configuration is considered to be an important all-optical wavelength conversion scheme, because of its conversion efficiency, high extinction ratio, and low chirp characteristics. It is found that the techniques for optical demultiplexing includes four wave mixing in semiconductor amplifiers, four-wave mixing in fibers, and semiconductor Mach-Zehnder and Michelsen interferometers.
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