Abstract

Optical boosting is especially important for high-bit-rate transmission systems in which insertion-loss compensation of the optical modulator is required, and this is one of the fields in which semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) can be advantageously applied because of compactness. One of the key issues in the semiconductor optical booster is the elimination of pattern-dependent amplification, and high-power multiple- quantum-well (MQW) amplifiers have been investigated.’^-3 In this paper we report, for the first time to our knowledge, an SOA module designed as an optical booster and provide its biterror-rate (BER) performance at 10 Gbit/s for a 240-km transmission.

© 1994 Optical Society of America