Measurements of very low bit-error rates of optical switches based on semiconductor optical amplifiers

Very low bit-error-rate (BER) performance of an 8/spl times/8 nonblocking optical switch based on semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) was measured using a simple extrapolation technique and optical disturbance. The results show the impact of SOA´s amplified spontaneous emission and dynamic gain saturation on the low BER (<10/sup -12/) behavior of the optical switching system. The input dynamic ranges of 24 dB with a BER at 10/sup -15/ and of 20 dB with a BER at 10/sup -30/ were achieved for the bit rate at 1.0 Gb/s with less than 2-dB power penalty.