Comparison of semiclassical and quantum descriptions of saturated erbium doped fibre amplifiers (EDFA)

The Bit Error Rate (BER) performance of Erbium Doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA) is analysed in this paper. An analysis of the BER from quantum statistics is compared to the BER obtained from semiclassical approaches. In earlier work [1], the authors showed how the predictions of the two treatments approached each other in the case of ideal amplifiers for large gain. In this paper, the analysis is carried out for non-ideal, i.e., saturated EDFA and it is found that convergence of the two treatments occurs at a lower gain for saturated amplifiers than for ideal amplifiers.