In this paper, we report counter-clockwise, clockwise, and, for the first time to our knowledge, butterfly bistability in 1550 nm Vertical Cavity Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers (VCSOA). Bistable operation is experimentally observed for bias currents ranging from 66-122% of threshold with switching powers as low as 2 microW. These switching powers are two orders of magnitude lower than any previous results in 1550 nm VCSOAs. These switching powers are consistent with previous reports on optical bistability in 850 nm VCSOAs and provide an important step towards the realization of small footprint, low power optical logic/switching elements in the 1550 nm wavelength band.

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Abstract.We report the demonstration of the uplink of a low-cost passive optical network ͑PON͒, utilizing a superluminescent light emitting diode ͑SLED͒ as a broadband light source, a coarse wavelength division multiplexer ͑CWDM͒ to slice the spectrum into standard CWDM channels, and a reflective semiconductor optical amplifier ͑RSOA͒ as modulator and amplifier at the remote site. We demonstrate 2.5-Gbps transmission over 1 km of single-mode fiber for all four channels of the CWDM link ͑1511, 1531, 1551, and 1571 nm͒, with the bit rate error ͑BER͒ of the system measured to be below 10 −12 . The main applications for this communication system are remote monitoring systems.

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