Abstract
Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA's) are essential for optical communications applications.1 One advantage of EDFA's is the compensation of splitting loss in frequency-division multiplexing (FDM) star networks.2 However, the effect of gain saturation due to multiple channels decreases the EDFA inversion and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). A study of EDFA gain saturation effects on receiver sensitivity, using a single 1 Gb/s [215–1] frequency-shift-keying (FSK) channel, is reported here. The power penalty caused by ΔG = 6 dB gain compression is found to be ~1.5 dB and to increase rapidly for ΔG > 6 dB, in agreement with our theoretical analysis which dearly identifies that such a rise is due to the measured increase in both the spontaneous emission factor, nsp, and relative contribution of the circuit noise.
© 1991 Optical Society of America
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