Experimental demonstration of pattern effect compensation using an asymmetrical Mach-Zehnder interferometer with SOAs

We propose an asymmetrical interferometer to compensate the pattern effect in semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) as an inline amplifier in dense wavelength-division-multiplexing (DWDM) system. Experiments are demonstrated with a commercial integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI)-SOA. The experiments showed that in a 16/spl times/10-Gb/s DWDM system, the power penalty induced by the SOA decreased from 6.8 to 0.9 dB by the interference at 1 mW input power, and the input power dynamic range of the SOA was efficiently extended.