SNR degradation due to variations in input signal power and polarisation state in semiconductor laser amplifier based switch systems

摘要

The BER performance of semiconductor laser amplifier (SLA) based optical switch systems is investigated theoretically and experimentally. The theoretical analysis is based on a single stage SLA model. The experimental results show good agreement with the theoretical calculations which suggest that, for a conventional direct detection receiver working at 2.5 Gbit/s, it is necessary to operate a SLA switch with input power larger than -20 dBm for an overall BER penalty of less than 1 dB.