Wideband Gain MQW-SOA Modeling and Saturation Power Improvement in a Tri-Electrode Configuration

A semiphenomenological wideband model is proposed for both the material gain and the gain coefficient of a multiquantum well semiconductor optical amplifier (MQW-SOA). This analytical model is integrated in an SOA-dedicated simulation tool and validated experimentally over a wide range of bias currents, input powers, and wavelengths. We demonstrate the ability of multielectrode configurations to increase the saturation power of MQW-SOA without sacrificing either their noise figure or their optical gain bandwidth A tri-electrode configuration permits to obtain an enhancement of the MQW-SOA output saturation power of more than 3 dB over 100 nm while maintaining its optical bandwidth (defined at -1 dB) at about 76 nm.