Nowadays, optical amplifiers designs are induced by new requirements generated by optical networks. The introduction of WDM reconfigurable networks with increasing rate from 10-40 Gb/s to 100 Gb/s and beyond, demand new optical amplifiers development with improved gain spectral flatness and noise figure for all operational range of input powers and set-point gains. In this paper, it was developed a hybrid distributed Raman/EDFA amplifier with a novel hybrid gain control (HGC) scheme based on joint actuation. The HGC was firstly developed by numerical simulation and after experimentally, in a WDM system with 100 km SSMF fiber span and full C-band load. The Results shows an improved equivalent noise figure with flattened gain spectrum for all amplifier operation range in dynamic optical networks.
Hybrid optical amplifier; Automatic gain control; EDFA; Raman amplifier; WDM reconfigurable optical networks
