Bidirectional S –band continuous wave operation in a depressed-cladding erbium doped fiber amplifier

• Main Authors: Ahmad, Harith, Zulkifli, Mohd Zamani, Latiff, A. A., Thambiratnam, K., Harun, S. W.
• Format: Article
• Language: English; English
• Published: National Institute of Research and Development for Optoelectronics 2009
• Subjects: QC Physics
• Online Access: http://irep.iium.edu.my/84352/1/Bidirectional%20S%20%E2%80%93band%20continuous%20wave%20operation%20in%20a.pdf; http://irep.iium.edu.my/84352/7/84352_Bidirectional%20S%20%E2%80%93band%20continuous%20wave%20operation%20in%20a%20depressed-cladding%20erbium%20doped%20fiber%20amplifier.pdf; http://irep.iium.edu.my/84352/

In this paper we propose and characterize a bi-directional Depressed-Cladding Erbium Doped Fibre Amplifier (DC-EDFA) for Continuous Wave (CW) S-band operation. The system uses a Depressed-Cladding Erbium Doped Fibre (DC-EDF) as the gain medium and 3-port OCs to facilitate bi-directional transmission. The performances of gain and noise figure are first studied for the conventional DC-EDFA setup and are obtained at 20 dB and 4 dB respectively. Subsequently, the bidirectional DC-EDFA is tested and is found to have a similar gain 20 dB but with a slightly higher noise figure of 8.5 dB. The highest gain of 19 dB is obtained for the low input signals of -30 and -20 dBm, while higher input signals of -10 and 0 dB show lower gains due to the on-set of saturation effect in the gain medium. A high noise figure of between 8 and 9 dB is also seen, and increases to 19 dB nearing the cut-off wavelength. The bi-directional EDFA shows no loss in the gain but does show an increase in the noise figure as compared to uni-directional S-band DC-EDFAs.