Compensation of gain saturation in SOA-gates by interferometric Mach-Zehnder wavelength converters

Compensation of signal degradation in semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) gates for optical switch nodes using all-active integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometric wavelength converters is experimentally demonstrated at 2.5 and 10 Gb/s. More than 10 dB improvement of the dynamic range is obtained compared to a stand-alone SOA-gate.