Influence of Multi-Cascaded Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers on the Signal in an Energy-Efficient System

Signal impairment is experimentally studied by using the extinction ratio (ER), error bit rate (BER) and optical spectrum in a three-cascaded semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) setup. The signal with the ER of 13 dB and BER of <10⁻⁹ is achieved after the signal passing through the cascaded SOAs. With the results obtained from the experiment, we confirm that the three-cascaded SOAs used to compensate for power in the optical transmission can be accepted. This experimental result also offers the possibility of achieving a higher throughput of multi-plane architecture by exploiting three switching domains instead of two switching domains in the energy-efficient design of a scalable optical multi-plane interconnection architecture. The space switches in output ports of multi-plane interconnection architecture can be improved to N=32×32×32=32768.