We report the performance degradation of optical receivers incorporating semiconductor laser amplifiers (SLAs) caused by the nonzero extinction ratio of the input optical signal. The resulting sensitivity penalty dependencies on bit rate, SLA gain and facet reflectivity are also investigated. The results clearly show that the new receiver can be more affected by a finite extinction ratio compared to a conventional pin or APD receiver. Using a bandpass optical filter to reduce amplifier spontaneous emission noise will increase the extinction ratio penalty.
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McDonald et al. (1989) studied this question.