Abstract

There has recently been great interest in developing high power, low noise, erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) for power boosting applications. A laser diode-pumped EDFA with saturation power up to 2.3 W has been demonstrated in the laboratory using bulk-coupling optics and multiple amplification stages.¹ Widespread deployment of high-power EDFAs in fiber-optic transmission systems, however, will require robust, compact high-power fiber-coupled laser diode pump sources. SDL has recently demonstrated a fiber-coupled M-MOPA laser diode package, with up to 1.2 W of fiber-coupled power at 980-nm wavelength.² In this paper we demonstrate a high-power EDFA pumped by a compact, robustly packaged fiber-coupled M-MOPA, resulting in saturation powers up to 24.8 dBm at 1.55-μm wavelength.

© 1996 Optical Society of America