Abstract

Terrestrial and submarine fiber-optic links and networks require reliable, high-performance, low-cost miniature fiber amplifiers. The ordinary Er-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) are constructed using several discrete components, including a pump laser diode (LD) packaged in a butterfly or TO package, a fused biconical WDM coupler, a fiber pigtailed isolator, a large size beam splitter and a packaged photodetector (PD). Obviously, conventional EDFAs suffer from many shortcomings, such as high component cost, high insertion loss due to each individual component and interconnection, difficulty of hermetic packaging and sealing, and bulky size.

© 1996 Optical Society of America