Chirped fiber-grating-integrated optical limiting amplifier for dispersion compensation

Recently, erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) have made rapid progress in the 1.55-μm band optical fiber transmission. However, high bit rate transmission is restricted by large chromatic dispersion of the conventional simple mode fiber (SMF) unless compensating techniques are used. The chirped fiber gratings (CFGs) are attractive as they are passive linear devices, with highly related dispersion, compact size and are relatively easy to fabricate. Using CFGs for dispersion compensation, the EDFAs are inserted repeatedly between SMF and optical circulators (OCs) in order to amplify the signals. However, the repeated spacing is limited by the loss of CFGs, SMF and OCs. In this report, by inserting a bi-directional EDFA between the OC and CFGs, we proposed an optical limiting amplifier (OLA) configuration in multi-wavelength for dispersion compensation. The link budget and dynamic range characteristics, bit-error-rate (BER) performance as well as the eye-diagram of the modulated signals were investigated and discussed