Tunable microwave photonic filter based on a fiber ring and erbium-doped fiber amplifier

The tunable microwave photonic filter based on a fiber ring and erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) was proposed. By introducing a section of erbium-doped fiber (EDF) into the fiber ring, the loss of the signal can be compensated by the EDFA gain through adjusting the pump power. This can largely increase the number of the effective sampling taps, and then improve the performance of the microwave photonic filter notably. When the pump power was set to be 42.7 mW, a microwave bandpass filter with the 3-dB bandwidth of 0.15 MHz, the Q factor up to 100 and extinction ratio up to 20 dB was achieved. By employing a tunable optical delay line in the above fiber ring, a tunable microwave photonic filter has been realized through tuning the length of the optical delay line. The proposed tunable microwave photonic filter can find great applications in microwave signal processing and ROF system.