Semiconductor optical amplifier pattern effect suppression for return-to-zero data using an optical delay interferometer

An optical delay interferometer (ODI) is employed to suppress the pattern effect manifested on a 10 Gb/s return-to-zero (RZ) data stream when amplified by a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) operated in deep gain saturation. The experimental results verify the competence of the scheme to confront the problem for this signal format by achieving a far better performance than that with the SOA alone.