Experimental Characterization of Nonlinear Distortions of Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers in WDM regime

Extending the bandwidth of optical transport systems is a promising way to increase the throughput in a fiber link. Under specific design, semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA) can provide ultra-wideband (UWB) and continuous amplification. For both off-the-shelf C-band SOA and UWB SOA devices, we show that SOA nonlinear impairments are not critical in wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) regime. We report on the impact of the WDM channel count onto the nonlinear distortions induced by an UWB SOA. We demonstrate experimentally that UWB SOA devices are well suited for wideband WDM signal amplification.