Development Of A Simulation System Based On Semiconductor Optical Amplifier

All optical networks (AON) are promising in the development of telecommunication networks with high speed and large capacity. Semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) is one of the key unit devices in AON, the nonlinearity effects in SOA are utilized to achieve many functions in networks, such as all optical wavelength conversion, optical switching, optical logic, 3R regeneration and demultiplexing and so on. Nowadays, many researchers have analyzed nonlinearity of SOA via different numeric methods and tried to find its applications. However, there is still a lack of simulation systems which are used to analyze the characteristics and applications of SOA, Optisystem, a famous optical communication simulator of Optiwave System Inc., considers SOA just as a common amplifier, eg.First of all, a high-rate dynamic modal of SOA is established employing MATLAB, considering photon distribution and carrier density distribution along active region, gain dispersion, amplifier spontaneous emission and facet reflectivity. This modal is established according to a few papers and applies to the cases that signals with single-channel rate lower than 10Gbit/s go through SOA. Based on this dynamic modal, a simulation system, SOA System Simulator, is developed employing Visual C++, which is specifically used for SOA system. There are three main parts included in this simulator, device form, system drawing area and information form. Beside of SOA, the simulator implemented dozens of secondary optical devices such as optical coupler, wave division multiplier (WDM), optical signal generator, optical filter and so on. Users are expected to draw systems designed by their own, and compare the simulated results with academic expectations. In order to verify the validity of SOA System Simulator, a few typical SOA systems such as cross-gain wavelength converter are chosen for test cases, and the results accord with the numeric results from MATLAB. Users are able to attempt their ideas conveniently at low cost, employing this simulator. However, it is still a simple tool for SOA system simulation, and only applies to researches on systems based on SOA in libraries.