Reduced component count optical delay discriminator using a semiconductor optical amplifier-detector

Abstract

Cross-gain modulation between pairs of counter-propagating pulses within a semiconductor optical amplifier is used as a pulse delay detector. Unlike previous designs based on differential photodiodes, the difference between average powers of the pulse trains after propagation are deduced from the voltage difference between two contacts on the SOA, eliminating the photodiodes and two optical couplers. Simulations show the design can be improved by adding a third contact. The linearity, sensitivity and noise performance of the design equal or surpass the original design.

A Novel Technique for Designing High Power Semiconductor Optical Amplifier (SOA)-Based Tunable Fiber Compound-Ring Lasers Using Low Power Optical Components

“…The proposed fiber compound-ring cavity has great potential to achieve an efficient, stable, simple and inexpensive compact highly power-scalable fiber system by passively combining a [49,50] low power (N >> 1) number of SOAs fiber compound-ring lasers by using N × N fiber couplers with high beam combining efficiency. Estimation studies of beam combining efficiency have shown that it degrades as the number of individual combined Y-shaped linear cavity-based fiber lasers increases (i.e., N > 8) [72].…”

“…In particular, SOAs have the capability to be integrated with other InP (Indium phosphide)-based optical components, which makes it more attractive to implement very high compact optical systems. Extensive theoretical studies and analysis of SOA-based optical systems have shown that they can be used for several applications, such as compact SOA-based laser rangefinders [48], optical pulse delay discriminators [49,50], and optical and logic gates [51] for high-speed optical communications by exploiting four-wave mixing [52,53]. In addition, note that when the SOAs are used in a bidirectional fiber ring resonator structure, such as the proposed one, they do not require extra optical components, for instance, optical isolators and optical circulators; as a result, they are easy to integrate with other optical components for compact fiber laser systems.…”

Design and simulation of a simple laser rangefinder using a semiconductor optical amplifier-detector

“…We previously presented a 3-contact SOA device that was capable of comparing the relative timing of two counter-propagating pulse trains [8], fed into the ends of the SOA. The timing was derived from the difference in voltages on the end contacts of the SOA.…”

“…This design was a simplification on the design of Awad et al [9] who used photodiodes to detect the output powers at each end of a single-contact SOA. A simple explanation for the operation of our device is as follows [8]. The contacts are connected to constant current sources.…”

Synchronization Detection Using XGM in SOA for All-Optical Preprocessing

“…However the FWM in HNLF requires high optical power to achieve high conversion efficiency. Another discriminator to detect Manuscript the amount of delay using cross gain modulation (XGM) in semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) has been theoretically proposed [11], [12]. Using XGM in SOA, low power operation and dense integration in optical circuit can be expected.…”