Modeling and measurement of noisy SOA dynamics for ultrafast applications

A complete and effective tool for the analysis of semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) in ultrafast telecommunication applications is presented. This model includes gain dynamics, the current induced gain saturation effect, the current-dependent gain dispersion, and the amplified spontaneous emission. Experimental results concerning both stationary and dynamic conditions confirm the model accuracy and its effectiveness in the design of all-optical signal processing schemes based on SOAs. Finally, we study the characteristic times and the efficiencies of SOA fast dynamics in order to investigate the bandwidth limits of these devices. A numerical evaluation, validated by high-resolution measures makes the SOAs suitable to process optical signals up to 160 Gb/s.