Utilizations of EDFA and SOA in series for broadband gain amplification

A broadband hybrid two-stage fiber amplifier module, constructed of an erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) and a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) in series, is proposed and investigated experimentally. In the proposed amplifier, a short length erbium-doped fiber (EDF) was used in first stage for the pre-amplifier to increase the gain and reduce the noise figure. Therefore, the proposed hybrid amplifier not only enhances gain value, but decreases the noise figure. Moreover, the proposed amplifier can achieve 110 nm amplification bandwidth between 1500 and 1610 nm, when the entire gain are large than 11 dB and noise figure are less than 8 dB for -25 dBm input saturation power. Moreover, the performance of gain and noise figure in the proposed fiber amplifier has also been discussed.