Fast and Robust Method for Measuring Semiconductor Optical Amplifier Gain

In this paper, we present a new, robust multipoint fitting method for gain measurement with a metric for quality estimation of the procedure. The method is able to identify the deleterious effect of imperfections within the test structures, is tolerant to optical coupling errors and is well suited to high throughput, generic, automated testing of semiconductor optical amplifiers. Gain is estimated in a range of pump current densities over multiple spectral bands from 1400 to 1600 nm with a standard error in the order of 1/cm.