Abstract

This manuscript tackles the issue of circuit parasitics of reflective semiconductor optical amplifiers (RSOAs), which has been often identified as the main culprit for their relatively poor modulation performance. Building upon the findings related to the beneficial effect of inductive peaking (IP) in the case of small-signals and following the principle of photonic-electronic co-design, in this paper we extend our study and reveal that the same effect can be beneficial for large-signal modulation as well. By using multi-Gaussian probability distribution for analyzing the histograms of the sampled signal at the RSOA's output, we explore the evolution of the back-to-back ${\bf Q}$ -factor under various operating conditions and benchmark the large-signal modulation performance of the IP enhanced RSOA against the one with parasitics excluded. The study confirms that the IP effect indeed provides enhancement of the ${\bf Q}$ -factor especially in the case of low input optical powers and low to moderate current densities of bits 0 and 1. We reveal that, provided that the modulation depth is kept fixed, ${\bf Q}$ -factor can be maximized by finding the optimum current corresponding to bit 0. The major and overall achievement of the IP implementation is the boost of the ${\bf Q}$ -factor through simple modulation current engineering, breaking the limit for post-processing free high quality transmission ( ${\bf Q}\ {\geq 7}$ ) for a broad range of bit-rates and seeding optical powers.

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