Abstract

One of today’s most popular optical gain media for telecommunications, the Erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA), possesses an intrinsically low gain per unit length, therefore forcing fundamental cavity frequencies of closed optical resonator systems to remain in the 10 MHz regime. Their wideband spectral characteristics allow the capacity for optical frequency tuning over a wide range, but also necessitate the need for harmonic modelocking at extremely high orders to achieve the bit rates typically desired for most current applications. Semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) are known to possess the attractive property of high gain per unit length, but have been somewhat overlooked due to the widely-held belief that their application in telecommunication arenas will be limited due to their noise properties.

© 2002 Optical Society of America