Performance of Three-stage Erbium-doped Fiber Amplifiers making use of Pump Sharing

Abstract

Pump sharing is an attractive solution to cope with the demand for low cost amplifiers in all-optical and regional networks based on wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM). In this paper, the performance of a three-stage erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) with the first two stages sharing a common pump is presented. Criteria for optimizing the power splitting ratio are indicated. In particular, different channel loads as well as component tolerances and manufacturing imperfections are considered. The performance of the EDFA making use of pump sharing is compared with simulation results for an equivalent standard EDFA setup using one pump per stage. Finally, the noise performance improvement that can be obtained by using high power pumps with output powers up to 600 mW is presented. Such pumps became available recently.

Investigation into the significance of failure rate calculations for erbium—doped fiber amplifiers in view of the reliability of communication networks

“…However, the pressure on prices for WDM systems on the world market pushed the development of new EDFA designs that can provide similar performance at reduced cost. The availability of pump lasers providing output powers in excess of 300 mW [3,4] paved the way to significant cost reductions by making use of pump sharing [5]. In addition to the cost advantage, reliability calculations predict a reduction of the estimated failure rate by approximately 17%.…”

Setup for EDFA stages based on pump power splitting yielding improved noise figure

“…With the availability of pumps that can provide more than 300 mW [7], using a common pump to provide energy to the coils before and after the interstage component has become an attractive so-lution to bring amplifier cost down to an acceptable level. Pump power splitting has proven to be a suitable technique to supply both coils with pump power [8] and offers some advantages as compared with the so called bypass technique [9,10]. In particular, higher output powers can be provided at only slightly increased noise figures.…”