A novel scalable photonic analog switch architecture based on semiconductor optical amplifiers

We propose a novel semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) based switch architecture for analog applications. Proof-of-principle experiments show that the system is very linear with an SFDR of approximately 100 dB/spl middot/Hz/sup 2/3/ for a switching time of 50 /spl mu/s. The port number of this switch is scalable and can be expanded to 80 /spl times/ 80.