Efficient modulation cancellation using reflective SOAs

Modulation cancellation and signal inversion are demonstrated within reflective semiconductor optical amplifiers. The effect is necessary to implement colorless optical network units for network end-users, where downstream signals need to be erased in order to reuse the carrier for upstream transmission. The results presented here indicate that reflective semiconductor optical amplifiers possess the perfect high-speed all-optical gain saturation characteristics to completely cancel the downstream modulation at microwatt optical power levels and are thus the prime candidate to be constituents of future optical network units. Theoretical considerations are supported by experiments that show the cancellation of signals with a 6 dB extinction ratio at 2.5 Gbit/s.