Experimental performance of semiconductor optical amplifiers and praseodymium-doped fiber amplifiers in 1310-nm dense wavelength division multiplexing system

Abstract

One of the key optical transmission components is optical amplifiers. Studies on the amplification properties of the 1310-nm optical amplifiers are presented. The evaluated optical amplifiers are semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) and praseodymium-doped fiber amplifier (PDFA). The study is aimed at the dynamic operation in single- and multiwavelength domains with high rate signals. The maximum obtained gain was 25.0 dB for SOA and 20.9 dB for PDFA. For the SOAs, the minimum achieved value of the receiver sensitivity was −11.5 dBm for a single channel and −11.5 dBm for a dense wavelength division multiplexing case while for PDFA those values were −11.0 dBm and −10.9, respectively. The main advantage of the PDFA in comparison to the measured SOAs is its higher saturation power. The SOAs proved to be viable candidates for high-speed amplification in the 1310-nm wavelength domain.