An approach for suppressing waveform distortion of SOAs by controlling the temperature on in-line optical amplifier systems

Abstract

Semiconductor Optical Amplifier (SOA) has attracted attention as a key component in supporting large capacity transmission systems. However, SOAs cause waveform distortion depending on the carrier lifetime, which ranges from picoseconds to nanoseconds, and this distortion degrades the signal quality. Thus, we are investigating suppressing the distortion by controlling gain characters and the carrier time by changing the temperature of SOAs on in-line optical amplifier systems. This paper reports that the distortion is suppressed by setting the temperature of the amplifier lower within the settable range, as a result of evaluating the temperature dependence of the distortion in optical amplification with SOAs theoretically.