On the application of long soas in linear operating and saturation regimes: Exploitation in high bit rate optical networks

In this paper, an investigation of the behavior of the long semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) in linear operating and saturation regimes is reported. Their exploitation feasibility for applications in high bit rate optical networks are therefore discussed. Hence, the impact of variation of the SOA active region length and the bias current on the saturation phenomena is analyzed referring to numerical simulations. It was shown that high saturation power feature, which is particularly required in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) applications to avoid crosstalk arising from gain saturation effects, can be achieved by increasing the bias current.