Picosecond-pulse generation over 10 GHz repetition rate based on cascaded semiconductor optical amplifiers

A cavity-free setup to generate short pulses at high repetition rate is introduced, which is based on four-wave mixing (FWM) in cascaded semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs). High repetition rate picosecond-pulse is important in optical communication and all-optic information processing systems. Cavity-free setup based on SOA means without ring cavity, which is stable and easy to be large-scale integrated. In this paper, we obtain picosecond-pulse around 10GHz repetition rate and the side-mode suppression ratio is 23 dB. Moreover, the repetition rate and center wavelength of optical pulse is tunable.