Abstract

Recently, we proposed a spectrum-sliced fiber amplifier light source for multi-channel WDM applications [1]. The high-power ASE from an EDFA could be efficiently divided into many channels using an integrated optic WDM demultiplexer [2]. Thus, this "spectrum-sliced" ASE could be used as light sources for WDM systems rather than several wavelength-selected DFB lasers. However, these incoherent light sources would suffer from excess noise caused by the beating of the various Fourier components within the broad spectrum. In particular, this excess noise becomes dominant over the electrical noise when the optical bandwidth per channel is significantly reduced, as in the proposed WDM light source. Thus, the SNR of the spectrum-sliced ASE source at the receiver is given.

© 1994 Optical Society of America