An approach to enhance the receiver sensitivity with SOA for optical communication systems

In this paper, we investigate an SOA (semiconductor optical amplifier) preamplifier structure by optimizing the carrier lifetime in order to reduce the amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise and crosstalk, with adequate gain increase. This proposed SOA optical preamplifier has no need of optical alignment and antireflection coating. This structure of SOA eliminates the need of optical filter, and exhibits large tolerance to the input light wavelength. The receiver sensitivity is investigated for single and multi channel transmission links. The received power of − 50.34 dBm is observed at bit error rate (BER) 10− 12 for 10 Gb/s with PIN receiver. Further, the impact of gain, amplified spontaneous emission power and gain variation for different carrier lifetime with input power for OOK system is illustrated. The proposed SOA has constant gain of 30.06 dB up to gain saturation for carrier lifetime 0.18 ns. It is predicted that low value of carrier lifetime suffers less from ASE noise.