Tunable gain clamping L-band erbium-doped fiber amplifier based on FBG and BBM

Abstract

An improved structure for the L-band Erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) with gain clamping is suggested to address gain instability resulting from variations in the number of optical channels and the compromised gain clamping performance due to misalignment in the center wavelength of the grating. Here, a linear resonant cavity is formed by a broad-band mirror (BBM) and fiber Bragg grating (FBG), and a variable optical attenuator (VOA) is used for cavity loss adjustment. Experimental results show that the L-band EDFA solves the problem that the center wavelength of the narrowband grating pairs needs to be consistent. The 20 dB gain bandwidth is 42 nm(1582 ∼ 1623 nm). For signal at 1605 nm, the gain can be tuned from 28.8 to 34.8 dB, and a 40 dB (−50 to −10 dBm) gain clamped dynamic range is obtained at the gain of 28.8 dB, with stability of ± 0.25 dB, for which noise figure (NF) is less than 5.3 dB.