Optical Switching

7SOA‐based Optical Switches

Xuwei Xue¹, Shanguo Huang¹, Bingli Guo¹, and Nicola Calabretta²

¹ State Key Laboratory of Information Photonics and Optical Communications (IPOC), Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China

² Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, Netherlands

7.1 Introduction

With the continuous advances in the experiments and development of the optical components and subsystems constituting the physical layer, capacity and speed in fiber‐optic communication networks have increased over the past decades. Technologies of component miniaturization and integration that continue to improve the performance in the network while maintaining economic feasibility are of paramount importance. To achieve such extremely high data rates, utilizing semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) as the key element in optical communication is a feasible scheme. Amplification of optical signals is not the only application SOAs are limited to. It is also validated performing as a significant element in high‐speed optical switching, wavelength conversion, optical regeneration, demultiplexing, all‐optical triodes, and all‐optical logic doors. Benefits of SOAs are well‐known including half‐rack size, wide gain band, integration compared to the Erbium‐doped Optical Fiber Amplifier (EDFA), especially their fast switching speed and the capability to modulate pulse signals with a high extinction ratio. However, the high coupling loss with optical fiber, mixed with ...