title: 5-Gb/s optical transmitter based on incoherent-light-injected RSOAs with graceful upgrade capability for WDM PONs.
abstract: We propose and demonstrate a novel and cost-effective optical transmitter based on incoherent-light-injected reflective semiconductor optical amplifiers (RSOAs) which can be upgraded to higher data rate without discarding the existing low-data-rate transmitter. The transmitter is based on optical time-division multiplexing (OTDM) of return-to-zero modulated RSOAs and thus capable of upgrading the system capacity on an as-needed basis simply by adding RSOAs. By using the proposed transmitter, we experimentally demonstrate a capacity upgrade from 2.5 to 5 Gb/s/channel by using two RSOAs, each operating at 2.5 Gb/s. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest reported data rate demonstrated using incoherent-light-injected RSOAs. We also demonstrate the performance of the proposed transmitter after 10-km transmission over standard single-mode fiber, and investigate the sensitivity penalty to the power level injected into the RSOAs as well as the optical delay for the OTDM.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical &Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Engineering Drive 3, Singapore 117583, Singapore.
authors.forename: Zaineb
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Al-Qazwini
authors.forename: Hoon
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kim
mesh_terms: D000669:Amplifiers, Electronic; D004867:Equipment Design; D019544:Equipment Failure Analysis; D008029:Lighting / Q000295:instrumentation*; D012666:Semiconductors; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000295:instrumentation*; D013685:Telecommunications / Q000295:instrumentation*