10 Gb/s operation of optical preamplifier using inverted ASE signal of saturated semiconductor optical amplifier

Summary form only given. Semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) are attractive for use in metro optical networks as well as in access networks. We proposed an optical preamplifier using the optical modulation of ASE in a saturated SOA. The proposed preamplifier only needs a single connection between a fiber and the SOA, which relaxes requirements on AR coating and assembling with a single mode fiber. In addition, this preamplifier can potentially avoid using a narrow-band optical filter. In this paper, we investigate the high-speed response of the preamplifier and demonstrate 10 Gb/s operation. In our proposed preamplifier, an input signal is converted to the modulation of the ASE due to the saturation characteristic in an SOA, resulting in the amplification of the signal. We investigated the high-speed response of the optical preamplifier. We used a polarization insensitive GaInAsP bulk SOA. We also investigated the improvement in receiver sensitivity of the optical preamplifier. We measured bit error rate (BER) curves with and without the optical preamplifier. The minimum receiver sensitivity was improved by about 10, 8 and 7 dB for 2.5, 5 and 10 Gb/s signal, respectively.