Noise Suppression and Intensity Modulation in Gain-Saturated Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers and Its Application to Spectrum-Sliced Light Sources

We present a quantitative estimation of noise reduction in a gain-saturated semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) for spectrum-sliced incoherent light sources. A noise reduction of 10 dB over a bandwidth of a few GHz was experimentally demonstrated. In addition, the intensity modulation of spectrum-sliced incoherent light using a GaInAsP/InP SOA modulator was carried out with a bit rate of 600 Mb/s. An error rate floor in bit error rate vs received optical power characteristics was removed with the help of this technique.