Abstract

LD-pumped optical amplifiers are key components in fiber networks. In a practical application, such as a fiber bus, the number of required amplifiers should be minimized for cost-effectiveness, since the cost is dominated by that of the pump LD’s. We propose a transparent fiber bus scheme in which all the optical amplifiers are remotely pumped by a single pump LD. The bus consists of conventional single-mode fiber and passive directional couplers, with erbium-doped fibers (EDF’s) spliced between them for loss compensation. The 1.48-µm pump wavelength is best suited for a chain of remotely pumped EDFA’s because of the low fiber loss near this wavelength. The concept was demonstrated in a four-station bus in which periodic gain maintains constant received signal power at each station. An accurate model made it possible to predict the EDF length required for each bus segment.

© 1993 Optical Society of America