Abstract
Traveling wave, semiconductor, optical power amplifiers are emerging as potentially useful components in lightwave systems.1 Our particular interest is in the use of such amplifiers in digital, high speed, intensity-modulation systems as linear nonregenerative repeaters2 or as posttransmitter power amplifiers.3 In these applications, it is required that the output power of the amplifier be sufficiently high that the signal arriving at the receiver, after suffering transmission losses, is strong enough to overcome receiver noise. At these power levels, the nonlinearity of the amplifier can distort the signal, thus potentially degrading system performance. Figure 1 shows the system under study. It consists of an optical power amplifier, fiber length of loss L, and direct detection receiver. The optical power waveform Pin(t) before the amplifier is assumed to be an ideal rectangular pulse NRZ sequence with bit duration T. Because of the nonlinearity of the amplifier, the output waveform Pout(t) will be a distorted version of Pin(t). The built-in memory of the amplifier, which is caused by the nonzero carrier lifetime in the active region,4 makes the nonlinear distortion associated with a given output bit dependent on the particular pattern of the preceding bits.
© 1990 Optical Society of America
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