Noise suppression of spectrum-sliced light using semiconductor optical amplifiers

The spectrum slicing method for slicing incoherent light by using an optical filter can easily generate large-scale multiwavelength light in bundles, but has the problem of beat noise in the spontaneously emitted light. We proposed noise suppression of spectrum-sliced light by using the characteristic of the gain saturation of the semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). In this paper, we quantitatively measure noise suppression by gain saturation of this SOA and improve the noise suppression in the high-frequency domain by lengthening the SOA. We also measure the bit error rate (BER) of the spectrum-sliced light that was noise suppressed by a gain-saturated SOA and demonstrate its possible application to light sources for high-speed optical transmission. Finally, we propose and demonstrate a gain-saturated SOA modulator that simultaneously suppresses noise and modulates. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 2, 86(2): 28–35, 2003; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjb.10077