Abstract

980-nm pump lasers permit erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDEAs) to achieve better performance than do other pump sources. Some of the aspects of this better performance are low noise figure,¹ low electrical power consumption,² high small-signal gain,³ and high-saturation output optical power.⁴ But the pump wavelength of a packaged 980-nm laser can suddenly hop out of the pump band, and the fiber output power and the monitor photodiode current can be unstable at different temperature. So even worse, the kink current of a packaged laser can be significantly lower than that of the laser chip. In this paper we study the causes of these problems.

© 1995 Optical Society of America