EDFA with continuous amplification of C and L bands for submarine applications

Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifiers (EDFA) are a key element for optical communications and several EDFA architectures were already proposed. This paper presents the theoretical and experimental results of the development of a silica based Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifier (EDFA) composed of three Erbium Doped Fiber (EDF) stages assembled in a serial architecture with two Gain Flattening Filters (GFF) between these stages. It was obtained 70 nm of amplified bandwidth in this architecture by using only two pump lasers operating below 225 mW. From these results, the proposed amplifier achieved an output power of 18.8 dBm by using dual pump architecture with 974 nm and 976 nm pump lasers. The high output power and wide amplification bandwidth from the resulting EDFA enables the transmission of up to 228 DWDM channels for more than 7000 km and is suitable for submarine applications.