Analysis of the phase noise in saturated SOAs for DPSK applications
01 April 2005
A theoretical model is used to analyze the impact of phase noise on the performance of semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) in the saturation regime for differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) applications. It was found that the variance of the differential phase error scales as T2/tc2 for tc >> T , where T is the bit period and tc is the carrier lifetime of the SOA. This suggests that the adverse effect of saturation- induced phase noise can be significantly reduced by increasing the bit rate or the carrier lifetime.