Reduction of nonlinear distortion in MQW semiconductor optical amplifier using light injection and its application in multichannel M-QAM signal transmission systems

By using an external light-injected multiple-quantum-well (MQW) semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA), we have demonstrated a 100-km optical fiber link that transports 77 channels of 64-QAM signals. This is equivalent to a system capacity of 2.3 Gb/s, while using a laser bandwidth of only 550 MHz. Under a requirement of carrier to noise and nonlinear distortion ratio of 30 dB per channel, the 1310-nm gain-peaked SOA input dynamic range was increased from 0 to 9 dB due to an injected light with 8.8 dBm and a wavelength of 1284 nm.