A new technical paper titled “Integrated SOAs enable energy-efficient intra-data center coherent links” was published by researchers at UC Santa Barbara.

“In this work, we analyze the impact of integrated semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) on link performance and power consumption, and describe the optimal design spaces for low-cost and energy-efficient coherent links. Placing SOAs after the modulator provide the most energy-efficient link budget improvement, up to 6 pJ/bit for large link budgets, despite any penalties from nonlinear impairments,” states the paper.

Find the technical paper here. Published May 2023.

Aaron Maharry, Hector Andrade, Stephen Misak, Junqian Liu, Yujie Xia, Aaron Wissing, Ghazal Movaghar, Viviana Arrunategui-Norvick, Evan D. Chansky, Xinhong Du, Adel A. M. Saleh, James F. Buckwalter, Larry Coldren, and Clint L. Schow, “Integrated SOAs enable energy-efficient intra-data center coherent links,” Opt. Express 31, 17480-17493 (2023).

Source: https://semiengineering.com/impact-of-semiconductor-optical-amplifers-on-performance-power-consumption-in-data-centers-ucsb/