Abstract

Recently semiconductor-based electroabsorption modulators (EAMs) became very attractive as optical demultiplexers for high-speed optical communication systems.^1,2,3 Their advantage is a low driving voltage, a high modulation efficiency, polarization insensitivity and the integrability with semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) and lasers. The disadvantages of EAMs are a rela tively large insertion loss of larger than 10 dB and switching windows which are larger than 10 ps at low driver voltages. In general cascaded EAMs are needed to demultiplex high-speed optical data signals, which further increases the insertion loss of the demultiplexer.

© 2002 Optical Society of America