Comparison of gain clamped and conventional semiconductor optical amplifiers for fast all-optical switching

This paper reports computer simulation results to compare a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) when the two arms of it operate with gain-clamped and conventional semiconductor optical amplifiers (gcSOA and convSOA, respectively) for fast all-optical switching. The comparison is for demultiplexing optical pulses from 160 Gb/s to the base rate of 10 Gb/s or 40 Gb/s. The gain dynamics of the gcSOA is presented, the switching windows at the drop port of the MZI for both cases that were referred before and finally an evaluation of them is discussed.