Quantifying system performance improvements in a high-density spectrum-sliced channel running at 10 Gb/s using semiconductor optical amplifier gain compression nonlinearities

Abstract

We report on the use of semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) gain compression for achieving intensity noise reduction in light from an incoherent broadband source, running at high data rate of 10 Gb/s in a narrow spectrum-sliced high-intensity channel of 20 GHz (∼0.16 nm ) bandwidth, in order to improve quality of performance in future spectrum-sliced systems. Data have been collected on the performance of a single SOA as noise reducer at various input powers and biases. Improvements of ∼20 dB in the relative intensity noise, together with commensurate improvements in both signal-to-noise ratio and quality factor, have been achieved at a nominal 0 dBm of power inserted into the SOA at 0.15 A bias. The overall results obtained herein give designers a knowledge of the best SOA operating conditions required, particularly in terms of bias and input power, in order to achieve a desired intensity noise reduction, and thus an overall system performance improvement, while still obtaining some signal gain from the SOA as well.