Design and simulation of reflective modulators based on semiconductor optical amplifier and electro-absorption modulator

Modulators and amplifiers are the building block of any optical access network. Reflective modulators based on combination of an electro-absorption modulator (EAM) and semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) are efficient devices for applications in carrier distributed optical access networks due to the gain provided by the SOA and the high speed & low chirp modulation of the EAM. Monolithically integrated reflective EAM-SOAs (R-EAM-SOAs) exhibits excellent performance due to the gain saturation properties of the SOA. Results depict that due to high gain SOA, these devices can be used in a region where the output power is clamped around a maximum value for input carrier powers. In this region of operation, the R-EAM-SOA also exhibits low pattern distortion despite being in a saturated regime. In this paper, we study, analyze and simulate a complete optical communication network using integrated reflective EAM-SOAs (R-EAM-SOAs).