Detailed experimental and theoretical investigation and comparison of the cascadability of semiconductor optical amplifier gates and gain-clamped semiconductor optical amplifier gates

Summary form only given. Here, a detailed investigation of the cascadability of gain clamped semiconductor optical amplifiers (GC-SOAs) is presented and compared to that of conventional SOAs for different bit rates. The analysis is both theoretical and experimental and shows that at 2.5 Gbit/s more than 30 GC-SOAs can be cascaded while only seven conventional SOAs (@1-dB penalty).