Abstract

There is currently much interest in the use of semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) for applications as booster amplifiers in optical fibre communication links.¹ Here the compactness of the SOAs makes them particularly attractive for metro applications, and hence much work has addressed the polarisation dependence of the gain in these devices. Various techniques, involving careful design of the device structure have achieved low levels of polarisation dependence across large optical spectra. However, for applications in which cascaded amplifiers are required, there remains on occasion a significant system impairment owing to the cascaded effect of independent polarisation dependent gain levels in these devices.

© 2002 Optical Society of America