Erbium doped fiber amplifier technology continues to progress at an astonishing rate with thousands of commercial systems now in routine service around the globe. Fibercore Limited offers a range of three erbium-alumina co-doped fibers, each designed to enable EDFA designers and manufacturers to satisfy the Communication Industry’s ever-increasing demands for bandwidth and output power.

DF1500F-980 and DF1500F-1480 are the standard ‘C-band’ fibers, providing usable gain from 1530 nm to 1565 nm. DF1500L-980 has more than twice the erbium concentration of DF1500F, yet sacrifices little in terms of conversion efficiency, enabling ‘L-band’ EDFAs, operating up to around 1600 nm, to be constructed with relatively short lengths of fiber. DF1500L is also well-suited to applications in fiber lasers and superfluorescent (ASE) sources.

Performance is highly dependent upon the precise configuration and execution of the EDFA design. However, quantum efficiencies of c.70% and noise figures of better than 5 dB are achieved routinely in commercially-manufactured devices.

The results were obtained from a production EDFA manufactured by one of Fibercore Limited’s OEM customers. The gain-section contains less than 10 metres of standard DF1500F-980.

All Fibercore Limited Amplifier fibers may be supplied complete with perform-specific parameter files for use in the EDFA Design_LITE simulation package. This package is offered to you in collaboration with software specialists Optiwave and will enable you to both evaluate the product fully and to optimise your EDFA design without costly experimentation.

EDFA Design_LITE is supplied free-of charge with your first order for 2000 metres of DF1500F or 1500 metres of DF1500L. Copies of the package may also be purchased separately.

Erbium doped fiber amplifier technology continues to progress at an astonishing rate with thousands of commercial systems now in routine service around the globe. Fibercore Limited offers a range of three erbium-alumina co-doped fibers, each designed to enable EDFA designers and manufacturers to satisfy the Communication Industry’s ever-increasing demands for bandwidth and output power.

The ability to achieve consistent, low-loss splices between the gain fiber, pump WDM and signal fibers is one of the key factors that dictates EDFA performance. A high splice loss not only wastes vital pump energy, but also generates back-reflections which can increase noise figure, signficantly. The core composition of all DF1500 series fibers is designed to facilitate mode-field expansion which, when combined with excellent core-cladding concentricity, ensures typical splice losses of better than 0.1 dB and 0.2 dB when spliced to a typical pump WDM or signal fiber, respectively.