Distortion-free amplification of high-speed test patterns up to 100 Gbit/s with erbium-doped fibre amplifiers

A report is made on the first distortion-free optical amplification of high-speed signals up to100 Gbit/s in an erbium-doped fibre amplifier. The amplifier's high-speed temporal characteristics were measured and compared with those of a semiconductor optical amplifier. The high-speed optical test patterns (repetitive or modulated) were generated from a gain-switched DFB laser using optical spectral filtering, chirp compression and optical time-division multiplexing.