Abstract

Recent progress on erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA) has been very rapid since they have a great potential for opening a new field in high-speed optical communication [1]~[3]. EDFAs operate in the 1.5 μm region where the fiber loss in an ordinary silica-based single-mode optical fiber is minimized. Their typical advantages are a high gain of more than 30 dB, low noise, wide bandwidth, polarization insensitive gain, and high saturation output power. Because of these excellent characteristics, EDFAs are very useful not only for high speed communication, but also optical soliton communication and multi channel optical subscriber systems.

© 1990 Optical Society of America