Highly gain-saturated GaInAsP/InP SOA modulator for incoherent spectrum-sliced light source

We proposed and demonstrated a highly gain-saturated semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) modulator for spectrum-sliced multi-wavelength light sources. The saturation in gain enables us to reduce the spontaneous emission beat noise in spectrum-sliced incoherent light, which is a main problem in incoherent spectrum slicing. The intensity modulation of spectrum-sliced incoherent light using a GaInAsP/InP SOA modulator was carried out with a bit rate of 600 Mb/s. An error rate floor was removed with a help of highly saturated gain. Expected performances of this proposed SOA modulator including efficiency and noise reduction capabilities will also be discussed for use in high-capacity WDM local area networks