Abstract
It has been widely recognized and observed in actual high-speed intensity-modulated lightwave systems that lasers biased in the region near or below threshold can introduce significant error-rate floors in the overall system performance because of the stochastic turn-on-delay behavior of these devices.1 This behavior is a direct result of spontaneous emission at low photon numbers and is represented by Langevin noise terms in the laser-diode rate equations. Previously, these terms have been omitted to simplify and speed up the evaluation of system-error-rate performance.2 However, this approach, which is valid only under the assumption that the laser diode is biased well above threshold, raises several questions: How can we calculate the true error-rate performance and error-rate floors in these systems? How far above threshold should the laser be biased to ensure a negligible error-rate floor and at the same time keep the extinction-ratio power penalty to a minimum? Are there any simple measurements that can be performed on the modulated optical output of a laser diode to help select laser diodes for optimum overall system-error-rate performance?
© 1994 Optical Society of America
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