Active Fabry-Perot cavity for photonic temporal integrator with ultra-long operation time window

In this paper, a photonic temporal integrator based on an active Fabry-Perot (F-P) cavity is proposed and theoretically investigated. The gain medium in the F-P cavity is a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) with high gain coefficient. Key feature of the proposed photonic integrator is that the length of integration time window is widely tunable and could be ideally extended to infinitely long when the injection current is approaching lasing condition. Based on an F-P cavity with practically feasible parameters, a photonic temporal integrator with an integration time window of 160 ns and an operation bandwidth of 180 GHz is achieved. The time-bandwidth product of this photonic temporal integrator is 28,800, which is about two-orders of magnitude higher than any previously reported results. Gain recovery effect has been also considered and analyzed for the impact on performance of the photonic integrator, followed by the simulation results of the impact of gain recovery.