Power penalties due to in-band and out-of-band dispersion in FBG cascades

We measure the in-band dispersion penalty in a cascade of five 50-GHz low-dispersion linear-phase fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) and compare the results with conventional apodised FBGs. At the 0.5-dB power penalty level, the usable bandwidth of a single linear-phase FBG (40 GHz) is twice as wide as that of a conventional apodised FBG (19 GHz). The bandwidth-utilization factor of a single linear-dispersion grating is 89%, while for the five-grating cascade, it is 76%. To our knowledge, these are the highest values reported to date for cascaded optical devices. The corresponding factors for the conventional gratings are 53% and 31%. We also measure the additional penalty on a dropped channel caused by a cascade of five adjacent-channel gratings. The bandwidth narrowing due to the adjacent-channel FBGs is 6 GHz both for linear-phase and conventional FBGs, giving a usable bandwidth of 34 GHz (linear-phase) and 13 GHz (conventional).     

Low-noise intelligent cladding-pumped L-band EDFA

We present results on a low-cost cladding-pumped L-band amplifier based on side pumping (GTWave) fiber technology and pumped by a single 980-nm multimode diode. We show that simultaneous noise reduction and transient suppression can be achieved by using gain clamping by a seed signal (/spl lambda/=1564 nm). In the gain-clamping regime, the amplifier exhibits 30-dB gain over 1570-1605-nm spectral band with noise figure below 7 dB. The noise figure can be further reduced to below 5 dB by utilizing a low power single-mode pump at 980 nm. The erbium-doped fiber amplifier is relatively insensitive to input signal variations with power excursions below 0.15 dB for a 10-dB channel add-drop.     

Performance limitations of high-power DFB fiber lasers

In this letter, we experimentally study several different configurations of high-power single-frequency sources based on distributed-feedback fiber laser (DFB FL). In particular, we have compared two schemes in terms of pumping efficiency, relative intensity noise (RIN) and optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR): directly pumped DFB FLs pumped by a high-power fiber-based pump source (stand-alone DFB FL) and a combination of a DFB FL and a power amplifier (amplified DFB FL). At the output powers below 40 mW, a stand-alone DFB FL has the highest OSNR (> 63 dB) and the lowest RIN (< -165 dB/Hz). The net efficiency of a stand-alone DFB FL can be doubled by using an amplified DFB FL at the expense of degraded OSNR and RIN. It is also shown that RIN below -160 dB/Hz and OSNR > 60 dB can be achieved by an amplified DFB with output power greater than 1 W.