Ultra-broadband amplified spontaneous emission source by using heterogeneous optical amplifier

Abstract

In this work, we propose and experimentally investigate an ultra-broadband amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) light source with 113.8 nm bandwidth (1446.2 to 1560.0 nm) by using a cascaded two-stage optical amplifier, which is consisted of semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA, 1st stage) and erbiumdoped fiber amplifier (EDFA, 2nd stage), when the output intensity is above -35 dBm/0.01 nm. And, the EDFA only uses a 3 m long erbium-doped fiber (EDF) with a 27 mW pumping power and SOA is driven at 200 mA bias current. Moreover, the proposed amplifier also can provide a broadband gain amplification of 114 nm in the wavelengths of 1464.0 and 1578.0 nm with the noise figure distribution of 6.8 to 8.1 dB.