Abstract

The most serious difficulty facing multi-wavelength lightwave systems with fiber- amplifier cascades appears to be that of gain equalization. When wavelength-multiplexed signals traverse a single fiber amplifier, the channels experience various gains, determined by the spectroscopy of the gain medium and the signal and pump power traversing it. In a single amplifier, these spectral gain variations are generally modest. The serious problem, however, is that they accumulate from stage to stage, rapidly growing far too large to allow adequate noise performance at the less-favored signal wavelengths.

© 1993 Optical Society of America