SOA Gain Uniformity Improvement Employing a Non-Uniform Biasing Technique for Ultra-High Speed Optical Routers

In this paper, the authors propose a non-uniform biasing technique to improve the uniformity of the Semiconductor Optical Amplifier (SOA) gain for ultra-high speed applications. In ultra-high speed applications, rapid gain recovery of the SOA is necessary to minimize the gain standard deviation and thus reducing system power penalties. A triangular shape biasing current is used in order to accelerate the SOA gain recovery while reducing the gain standard deviation. The effect of the non-uniform bias current on the SOA gain is investigated. The SOA is modeled using a segmentation method and the detailed theoretical analysis for the model is presented.