Complete Analysis of Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplifiers Technical Paper

Optical amplifiers make the communication system transparent from the beginning to the end, in contrast to conventional repeater-type systems. This poses new challenges for the performance of all system components, including the optical amplifier. As a consequence, optical amplifiers need to be most thoroughly tested before their deployment. This paper discusses methods and instruments for measuring EDFAs with respect to gain and noise figure, both in static and dynamic form, polarization dependence, polarization mode dispersion, wavelength division multiplex (WDM) characteristics and more. The influence of the source's spectral width on the amplifier's performance is also discussed. Authors Christian Hentschel is the manager of the lightwave standards laboratory at HP's Böblingen Instruments Division in Germany. He studied communications engineering at the University of Aachen and graduated as Dr. of Engineering in l971. Since joining HP in 1972, he has been in various R&D positions including project manager of HP's first-generation fiber optic instrumentation. Author of HP's Fiber Optics Handbook, he has been active in the development of fiber optics instrumentation technology, measurement standardization and applications since l982. Edgar Leckel is the project manager in R&D at HP's Böblingen Instruments Division in Germany. He studied communications engineering at the University of Stuttgart and joined HP in 1988. Since then he has played a leading role development of the tunable laser source, optical power sensors and EDFA test system. He has published several papers on tunable lasers and other fiber optic instrumentation.