Reducing crosstalk and signal distortion in wavelength-division multiplexing by increasing carrier lifetimes in semiconductor optical amplifiers

Author

Xu, Shuangmei ; Khurgin, Jacob B. ; Vurgaftman, Igor ; Meyer, Jerry R.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, MD, USA

Volume

21

Issue

6

fYear

2003

fDate

6/1/2003 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

1474

Lastpage

1485

Abstract

A simple theory for the crosstalk in multichannel wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) communication systems caused by the cross gain saturation in semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) is developed. It is shown that increasing the carrier recombination lifetime while reducing the differential gain in the SOA greatly mitigates the crosstalk. An SOA using type-II quantum wells with reduced recombination probability is designed, and its characteristics are numerically modeled for a number of different WDM systems. It is shown that when used as a preamplifier or in local/metro networks with a small number of amplifiers, error-free transmission can be achieved with the type-II SOA.

Keywords

electron-hole recombination; local area networks; metropolitan area networks; optical crosstalk; optical saturation; optical transmitters; preamplifiers; probability; quantum well lasers; semiconductor device models; semiconductor optical amplifiers; wavelength division multiplexing; LAN; carrier lifetimes; carrier recombination lifetime; crosstalk reduction; differential gain; error-free transmission; metro networks; multichannel WDM communication systems; multichannel wavelength-division multiplexing communication systems; semiconductor optical amplifier; signal distortion; type-II quantum well laser; wavelength-division multiplexing; Charge carrier lifetime; Communication systems; Crosstalk; Numerical models; Optical amplifiers; Optical distortion; Preamplifiers; Radiative recombination; Semiconductor optical amplifiers; Wavelength division multiplexing;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Lightwave Technology, Journal of

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0733-8724

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/JLT.2003.812721

Filename

1216184