SEMICONDUCTOR OPTICAL AMPLIFIER FOR WAVELENGTH CONVERSION IN SUBCARRIER MULTIPLEXED SYSTEMS

The fabrication and performance of a semiconductor optical amplifier f or wavelength conversion in subcarrier multiplexed system is described , The amplifier is of the buried facet design and has polarization and reflectivity gain ripple of less than 1 dB, Using subcarrier multiple xing, multiple 50-Mb/s data streams at a wavelength of 1.553 mu m are injected into the amplifier, The gain nonlinearity of the amplifier tr ansfers the data to a different wavelength of light simultaneously inj ected into the amplifier. Error free retrieval of subcarrier multiplex ed data has been demonstrated for the wavelength converted output, The small signal bandwidth of the wavelength conversion process is 5 GHz. Calculation suggests that higher bandwidth is feasible at higher inpu t powers at the expense of lower modulation transfer during wavelength conversion.