Gain saturated SOA cascaded EML analog optical transmitter

Abstract

We present an improvement in an analog optical transmission performance by reducing both the nonlinearity and the periodic RF carrier suppression. The proposed technique takes advantage of the gain saturation characteristics of a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) to reduce the intrinsic nonlinearity of an electroabsorption-modulated laser (EML) and the negative chirp characteristics of the SOA and EML to expand the transmission length and operating frequency. Furthermore, RF signal gain was also obtained through optical signal amplification.