All-optical mitigation of amplitude and phase-shift drift noise in semiconductor optical amplifiers

An all-optical scheme aimed at minimizing distortions induced by semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) over modulated optical carriers is presented. The scheme employs an additional SOA properly biased to act as a saturated absorber, and thus counteract the distortions induced by the first amplifying device. The scheme here is demonstrated in silico, for 40 and 100 Gb/s (10 and 25 Gbaud, 16 QAM), with reasonable total gain (>20 dB) for symbol error rate below the forward error correction limit. (C) 2015 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)