Analysis of the phase noise in saturated SOAs for DPSK applications

A theoretical model is used to analyze the impact of phase noise on the performance of semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) in the saturation regime for differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) applications. It is found that the variance of the differential phase error scales as T/sup 2///spl tau//sub c//sup 2/ for /spl tau//sub c//spl Gt/T, where T is the bit period and /spl tau//sub c/ is the carrier lifetime of the SOA. This suggests that the adverse effect of saturation-induced phase noise can be significantly reduced by increasing the bit rate or the carrier lifetime.