Loss Management

Week 10
Lecture 22: 4 April 2020
Amol Choudhary
 Why amplify?
• Signal sees loss of 0.2 dB/km at 1550 nm.
• After ~100 km 20 dB signal lost.
• Propagation length is 1000s of km. need to periodically amplify signal
• Typically, in a longhaul system an amplifier is kept ~80 km

• Two types of amplifer schemes:

• Lumped: EDFA
• Distributed: Raman

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 Revisit NLSE
• Introduce a loss term, exponential decay:
• Modify the NLSE to be

• The signal evolution can be written as if no other sources of

loss
• This clearly shows the power falls down exponentially. ~20 dB for 100
km transmission
• Of course, all amplifiers add noise (unfortunately!)

Noise
gain 3
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 Lumped amplification
• Assume the length of each amplifier is la << LA(amplifier spacing)

lA

LA
• For non-uniform spacing, Fiberlabs.com
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 Distributed amplification
• Solve this over whole fiber length

• The gain satisfied the following equation

Gain

• Here LA is the pump station spacing

• Raman pump at 1450 for C+L band amplification

Cisco.com, Gazettabyte.com 5
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 Bidirectional Raman pumping LA

• Use two pumps Loss at pump

• Then, solving g1 g2

Bi-directional
• For backward
Backward

• The power varies only by ~20% for bi- Lumped

directional pumping, 100% for backward
and almost 10x for lumped
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 Erbium Doped fiber amplifer
• Have a gain medium which consists of
Erbium ions (Er3+)
• Pump at 980 nm or ‘in-band’ pumping
• In-band pumping at 1480 has a lower
absorption than 980
• Pumping can be co-, counter- or bi
• Gain is broadened both
homogenously due to stark Splitting
and inhomogenously due to structural
disorders
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 2-Level Model
• For understanding, neglect excited state
absorption, and rapid decay from upper ESA
level
Photon Flux
N2

N1
Spontaneous Emission lifetime ~10ms
• All powers vary along the fiber due to
absorption and Spontaneous emission
Confinement factor
• If no spontaneous emission then
• Gives +1 for forward, -1 for backward pump
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 Small-signal analysis
• The gain is given by
• Total amplifier gain is given by:
• After a particular length the
gain falls down, as longer
length is unpumped and
absorbs the signal
• Since lifetime is long, not
effected by the pulses

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 Pin Pout=G*Pin
G
Amplifier noise
• Noise factor is defined as
• Assume a shot-noise-limited detector
• Then
• Spectral density of ASE:
Spontaneous emission factor

• Dominant noise is spontaneous emission mixing with signal

• Then
• => Noise figure >3 dB. Typically 6-8dB
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 Multi-channel operation
• Non-uniform gain is a problem
• Try to ‘flatten the curve’ using filters
• Can also design L band amplifiers
• C+L bad amplifiers too

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