Stable and Wavelength-Tunable Self-Injected Reflective Semiconductor Optical Amplifier-Based Fiber Laser

Abstract

In this investigation, we propose and demonstrate a stable and wavelength-tunable self-injected reflective semiconductor optical amplifier (RSOA)-based laser by using the Faraday rotator mirror (FRM) and the fiber mirror (FM) serving as a reflected element, respectively. Here, a 1.2-GHz RSOA can be enhanced to similar to 3 GHz by utilizing a self-injected mechanism. In the measurement, applying the optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing quadrature amplitude modulation (OFDM-QAM) with a bit-loading algorithm on the self-injected RSOA directly, the proposed laser can achieve a 3.5-Gb/s data rate in a 20-km single-mode-fiber transmission below a forward error correction (FEC) threshold. Moreover, the related output performance of the proposed RSOA-based laser is also discussed, whereas the FRM and the FM are utilized for comparisons.