Erbium-doped fiber amplifier cascade for multichannel coherent optical transmission

The requirements and practicalities of amplifier cascades for multichannel coherent transmission are discussed. A four-amplifier cascade which maintains an overall noise figure of less than 13 dB across a 20-nm optical bandwidth for total input powers up to -10 dBm is described. A potential capacity of 100 wavelength division multiplexing channels is demonstrated in a 300-km 622-Mb/s DPSK (differential phase shift keying) coherent transmission experiment. >