A gain-flattened ultra wide band EDFA for high capacity WDM optical communications systems

An 84 nm gain-flattened ultra wide band erbium-doped silica fiber amplifier for high capacity WDM optical communication systems is demonstrated with a noise figure of 6 dB and an output power of 25 dBm. We demonstrated an ultra wide band EDFA with a two-section, split band structure. The total 3dB bandwidth is 84.3 nm, which should be able to support 100 WDM channels with 100 GHz channel spacing or 200 WDM channels with 50 GHz channel spacing. The split bands allow independent optimization of each band for dispersion compensation and span loss variations.