Nondegenerate Four-Wave Mixing in Tensile Strained MQW Semiconductor Optical Amplifier

To realize an ultrahigh speed optical transmission system, applications of nonlinear phenomena have recently been investigated for optical DEMUX with four-wave mixing(1), (2) or dispersion compensation(3). If an optical fiber is employed as a nonlinear device, the fiber need to be very long for high efficiency because of the very small nonlinear effect ion of the fiber. This causes the system to become unstable. The use of a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) as the nonlinear device, however, have an advantage in this point. With such function as a switching device, the SOA is expected to play a major role as the nonlinear device. We investigated the characteristics of the Nondegenerate four-wave mixing (NDFWM)(4) with the input signal power and the device length on these SOAs. The devices which are used in this measurement are polarization independent SOAs using tensile strained quantum wells.