Intensity Noise in Incoherent-to-Coherent Wavelength Conversion in SOAs

Abstract- We examine a noise reduction scheme exploiting cross-gain modulation in SOAs to convert the incoherent re-ceived signal to a coherent signal before the detection process, thus reducing the bit error rate (BER) floor. We present ex-perimental results on the effect on the intensity noise in a spec-trum-sliced incoherent light system incorporating semiconduc-tor optical amplifier (SOA) based noise reduction of the follow-ing key parameters: optical bandwidth, electrical bandwidth and the incoherent received power. I