Effects on semiconductor optical amplifier gain quality for applications in advanced all-optical communication systems

Abstract

Semiconductor optical amplifiers are strong candidates to replace traditional erbium-doped-fibre-amplifiers in future all-optical networks by virtue of their proven functional capabilities, in addition to gain. They are also smaller, cheaper and easier to integrate than fibre amplifiers. This study summarizes the gain quality of the semiconductor optical amplifier with varying effects such as input power, bias current and wavelength and data rate. The results reported herein show high quality gain, coupled with accept ably low noise figure values.