Improvement in the Extinction Ratio of Output Optical PCM Signals From an Uncooled External Cavity Diode Laser by Using a Semiconductor Saturable Absorption Device

Author

Sato, Toshiya ; Yoshimoto, Naoto

Author_Institution

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp., Atsugi

Volume

25

Issue

6

fYear

2007

fDate

6/1/2007 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

1474

Lastpage

1483

Abstract

This paper describes the increase in the extinction ratio (ER) of an optical signal achieved by using a semiconductor saturable absorption device (SAD). We investigate a method for optimizing the SAD length in order to increase the ER, where we deal with the SAD characteristics phenomenologically. We then undertake a theoretical analysis of the bit error rate dependence on the ER increase. We clarify experimentally that by using a SAD with an effective length of 350 , the ER of the output optical signals from an uncooled directly modulated light source can be increased from 6.8 to 8.2 dB and, thus, conform to the synchronous optical network/synchronous digital hierarchy standard.

Keywords

error statistics; laser cavity resonators; optical communication equipment; optical fibre networks; optical modulation; optical saturable absorption; semiconductor lasers; synchronous digital hierarchy; bit error rate dependence; directly modulated light source; extinction ratio; output optical PCM signals; semiconductor saturable absorption device; synchronous digital hierarchy standard; synchronous optical network; uncooled external cavity diode laser; Absorption; Bit error rate; Diode lasers; Erbium; Extinction ratio; Optical devices; Optical modulation; Optimization methods; Phase change materials; SONET; Gratings; nonlinearities; optical fiber communication; semiconductor lasers;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Lightwave Technology, Journal of

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0733-8724

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/JLT.2007.895341

Filename

4232519