Extremely fast, high-gain and low-current semiconductor optical amplifier by optical speed-up at transparency

摘要

High-speed semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) are required in many devices for all-optical processing in WDM networks. They can be used as linear devices (optical gates for optical switching for example) or they can be required for their nonlinear properties (to realize complex functions like wavelength conversion). The extremely fast gain recovering in SOAs is required for high-bit-rate applications in future optical systems. The gain recovery time can be only moderately reduced by increasing the conventional SOA length but this also reduces the optical gain bandwidth.