Performance analysis of semiconductor optical amplifier as a gate switch

Abstract

Semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) is a device that amplifies an optical signal directly, without the need to first convert it to an electrical signal. Furthermore, it can also be used use as a gate switch. We proposed hybrid optical switch architecture (HOSA) for data center network in our recent work which is based on fast and slow optical switches. We considered micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) for slow optical switches and SOAs for fast optical switches. We considered network layer performance of HOSA in that work. In this paper, we focus on the evaluation of physical layer performance of optical switches. As MEMS technology is very much mature and it is widely used in the backbone optical network, so we focus only on the SOAs. This paper presents the characterization of SOAs to evaluate the performance in the physical layer. The main theme of this paper is to find out the best configuration of SOAs which can be considered to design an appropriate architecture of fast optical switch based on SOAs. We used VPITransmissionMaker simulation framework to evaluate the performance of SOAs. The results show that the combination of 10mA for bias and 200mA for amplitude is the best configuration of SOAs that can be considered to design a fast optical switch based on SOAs.