Optical power monitoring based on optoelectronic oscillator using semiconductor optical amplifier.

ABSTRACT A novel optical power monitoring method based on a highly optical power sensitive optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) incorporating a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) is presented and the theoretical fundamentals of the design are explained. The proposed SOA-based OEO exhibits a good stability with a single sideband phase noise below −100 dBc/Hz at an offset of 10 kHz without any narrow band radio frequency (RF) filters in the loop. A prototype with a dynamic optical power monitoring range of 6 dB and a measuring accuracy of 0.5 dB is experimentally demonstrated, only limited by the bandwidth of the RF components utilized in the loop. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 56:854-858, 2014 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]