A Self-Consistent Numerical Method for Calculation of Steady-State Characteristics of Traveling-Wave and Reflective SOAs

This paper presents a detailed numerical model of reflective and traveling-wave semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs), based on a self-consistent iteration method. The method is fully transparent to the input parameters and provides stable and efficient convergence of all relevant SOA variables as long as the sufficient number of previous iterations is taken into account. The model accounts for the detailed spectral and carrier density dependence of the radiative recombination rate, material gain, refractive index, and confinement factor. The analysis of unstrained bulk and strained multi-quantum well polarization insensitive SOAs based on this model provides a deep and detailed insight into the device internal state, confirming that spectral and carrier density material dependencies critically influence the modeling results.