Multi-wavelength mixing in a semiconductor optical amplifier and its consequence in a preamplified wavelength division multiplexing system

Summary form only given. Wave-mixing in a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) with more than two input wavelengths becomes more and more important for two reasons. At first, wavelength conversion with two pumps of different wavelengths allows to obtain a high efficiency over a wide tuning range. Secondly, a SOA may be used in a wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) system as an optical preamplifier as it can be monolithically integrated with wavelength demultiplexers and photodiodes. In such a system, the multi-wave-mixing in a SOA gives rise to crosstalk between different channels, which may introduce a power penalty to the bit-error-rate (BER). This paper presents theoretical and experimental results on the efficiency of multi-wave-mixing and its consequence on the BER performance in a SOA preamplified WDM system.