Theoretical Analysis of the Optical Filtering Effect on a Directly Modulated Reflective Semiconductor Optical Amplifier

Abstract

The modulation bandwidth of a reflective semiconductor optical amplifier (RSOA) is limited by carrier lifetime. Therefore, it is hard to directly modulate an RSOA with high-speed electrical signals. We theorize that an optical filter can act as an optical equalizer, compensating for the narrow bandwidth limitation imposed by the RSOA. By modeling a time-varying RSOA with a modified transfer matrix method (TMM), we simulated 25 Gbps operation of an RSOA with optical filtering effects. We investigated the impact of detuning the center wavelength of the optical filter on the modulation of an RSOA. The numerical results show that it is possible to modulate an RSOA with an optical filtering effect at 25 Gbps without electronic equalization or digital signal processing.