Design and analysis of L-band erbium doped fiber amplifiers

Optical Amplifiers are essential devices for long haul optical fiber communications. To extend optical communication window, wide band and flat gain optical amplifiers are needed. In this study, four types of erbium doped fibers, namely Fc-xsec, Fiber core, R31703, and ErFiber, were analyzed by using OptiAmplifier simulation program, with different pump powers, pump configurations and different input signal powers. These four types of EDF were applied to two types of new L- band EDFA configurations, namely double pass EDFA with wave selective coupler, and triple pass EDFA with passive EDF. The performance improvements have been achieved by the elimination of the residual pump power out of the signal and to realize high and flat gain and low noise figure. According to the simulation results the best result was obtained for the forward pumping ErFiber type EDF. Also, forward double pass EDFA with wave selective coupler (WSC) configuration was better with respect to gain, noise figure and gain flatness criteria. These results indicate increasing pump power lead to increase output power and decrease noise figure at the same time, as well as, the results are convergent for the bidirectional pumping. However, we found lower gain with higher noise figure for the backward pumping was used.