SHORT PAPER

International Journal of Recent Trends in Engineering, Vol 2, No. 7, November 2009

Development of Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifiers

using Photonic Crystal Fibers as Gain Media
Uma R. Rao1, and B. K. Lande2
1
Research Scholar, Dept. of Electrical Engg., V.J.T.I., Mumbai, India
Asst. Prof., Dept. of Electronics Engg., Shah & Anchor Kutchhi Engg. College, Mumbai, India
Email: uma.sakec@gmail.com
2
Professor & Head, Dept. of Electrical Engg., V.J.T.I., Mumbai, India
Email: bklande@vjti.org.in

AbstractErbium doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) are the
essential components of a highly efficient, long distance
optical data link. Their design has been refined to give
better performance parameters. In the recent years, a new
class of optical fibers known as photonic crystal fibers
(PCFs) is being explored for its suitability as a gain medium
in EDFA. The information regarding the progress in this
field is consolidated and presented in this paper.
Index TermsEDFA, PCF, index guiding, photonic band
gap (PBG), Finite element method (FEM).
I. INTRODUCTION
Optical communication plays a vital role in achieving
global connectivity. At present, it is the technology with
highest possible data rate. However, the demand for
higher data rates on optical networks is ever increasing.
This has resulted in the development of dense wavelength
division multiplexing (DWDM) systems. Signal
amplification at suitable transmission distances is
essential to make the data decodable at the receiving end
in a long distance optical link. Earlier data links used
repeaters which converted optical power into electrical
power and back into optical power after amplification.
This technique is expensive, slow and difficult to
implement at very high data rates that are associated with
DWDM [1].Optical amplifiers work in the optical domain
itself and are associated with several advantages like
higher gain efficiency, reduced insertion loss, improved
speed of operation, ease of maintenance etc. [2].
Four types of optical amplifiers that have practical
significance are basically identified. They are: Erbium
Doped Fiber Amplifiers (EDFA), Fiber Raman
Amplifiers (FRA), Erbium Doped Waveguide Amplifiers
(EDWA) and Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers (SOA)
[1]. EDFAs are the most popular choice for optical
amplification. They have undergone several design
refinements to achieve better performance ever since they
were first reported in 1987 with a gain of 28 dB at a
wavelength of 1536 nm [3]. Gain as high as 55 dB has
been currently achieved [4]. Their designs have been
optimized with respect to choice of gain medium, erbium
dopant concentration, host fiber geometry etc. [5]. The
refinement process seems to have reached a saturation
level.
In the past decade, a special class of optical fibers
known as photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) has become the
focus of active research in the field of optical network
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component design. PCFs are showing highly promising
performance features when used in optical amplifiers as
gain media. The following sections provide information
regarding the research findings of photonic crystal fiber
amplifiers and consolidate some of the reported results
through simulation and experimentation.
II. PHOTONIC CRYSTAL FIBERS
Photonic crystal fibers are very different in structure as
compared to the conventional optical fibers. They consist
of a cladding made of photonic crystal structure and the
core is either silica or air. Cladding has symmetrically
arranged air holes running parallel to the axis of the fiber.
The absence of one or several air holes at the center
forms a high index core in an index guided (IG) PCF. As
the cladding has an effective refractive index much lesser
than the core, propagation can take place by total internal
reflection. On the other hand, an air hole at the center
gives rise to photonic band gap (PBG) fiber. This makes
the refractive index of the micro structured cladding
much higher than that of the air core. Hence propagation
can not take place by total internal reflection. The
cladding structure prevents the light propagation through
it due to destructive interference and optical energy is
forced to propagate in the air core. In either case, the
propagation charecteristics are strongly influenced by the
geometry of the cladding [6, 7].
III. INITIAL DEVELOPMENTS
The earliest reported results analyzing the effect of
dielectric periodicity of the host medium in altering the
spontaneous emission properties of doped ions can be
seen in the experiments by R.F. Cregan et al [8]. They
have experimentally demonstrated the strong influence of
the positioning of the air holes of a PCF on the
spontaneous emission patterns using an index guiding
PCF with a pitch, = 2.56 m and an air hole diameter,
d = 0.6 m, fabricated using the facilities at Southampton
University. Later studies seem to have concentrated more
on applications of photonic crystal fibers in lasers. A.
Huttunen and P. Torma give a list of papers on PCF
lasers [9]. During the past few years, the possibility of
using PCFs in erbium doped fiber amplifiers is being
explored [10-17].
The mode area in a PCF can be tailored by varying the
two important design parameters: the pitch and the air

2009 ACADEMY PUBLISHER

SHORT PAPER
International Journal of Recent Trends in Engineering, Vol 2, No. 7, November 2009
hole diameter. The index guiding fibers may have very
large mode field diameter and withstand higher optical
power levels without getting affected by heating or non
linear effects. The PBG fibers can concentrate the mode
field within very small area and enhance the interaction
between the field profile and the dopant thus giving a
higher gain for a lower pump power. Unlike a step index
fiber (SIF), the mode profiles for the pump and the signal
can be very similar in the PCF.
The development of fiber amplifiers using PCFs may
be viewed under the possibility of using an index guided
fiber or a PBG fiber. Each of them can be used either
with EDFAs or with FRAs. The discussion in this paper
is limited to the use of PCFs in EDFAs.
IV. PCFs IN EDFA
A. Simulation Results
Several simulation results are reported for the use of
PCF in EDFAs. A common approach for PCF EDFA
simulation is a two step process. The pump and signal
propagation mode profiles are simulated using any one of
the available simulation techniques. These profiles are
used in propagation rate equations of the EDFA to find
the evolution of gain along the length of the fiber.
Thomas Sondargand has proposed a honey comb PCF
working on PBG effect and a triangular PCF working on
index guiding effect to be used with EDFAs [10].The
performance of PCF based EDFA and distributed
feedback lasers with respect to variations in the
operational parameters is studied through simulations and
the results are presented. But the fabrication of such PCFs
is a challenging task due to the index variation needed for
the core.
As the diameter of the air holes of the PCFs increases,
the modes get more and more confined to the fiber core
and the interaction between the doped ions and the mode
profile increases. This results in a lower input power to
achieve a target gain as compared to SIF with similar
operating parameters. The gain with PCF EDFA can be
higher by a factor of about 3 when the air hole diameter is
about 0.8 [11]. However, there seems to be an optimum
value of pitch to have the highest gain for the same set of
remaining parameters. A very low value of the pitch
reduces the physical dimensions of the PCF and the
signal power fails to get confined to the core where the
dopant concentration is the highest.
A. Cucinotta, F. Poli, S. Selleri, L. Vincetti and M.
Zoboli have reported the effect of varying the dopant
radius on the output gain [12]. They have provided one of
the first and detailed analysis of PBG fiber and a cobweb
fiber to be used in EDFA. PBG fiber has an air core and
hence dopant should be placed outside the radius of the
core hole which makes the strongest part of the mode
field not accessible to the ions for interaction. Instead,
triangular PCFs when doped with Er3+ ions are capable of
giving gains higher than 47 dB due to the overlapping of
the highest concentration of the ions with the strongest
regions of the mode profiles [13]. An integration of
amplification and dispersion compensation using PCFs is
also under consideration .
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2009 ACADEMY PUBLISHER
Very recently cladding pumped PCF amplifiers are
also being studied. Cladding pumping makes the pump
modes propagate in the cladding region near the core and
allows several modes to propagate whereas the signal in
the core is single mode. As the cladding modes
propagate, the interaction between the mode field and the
dopant ions takes place. Cladding pumping is attractive as
it eliminates the stringent coupling conditions for the
pump diode. In order to get several pump modes
supported in the cladding, the cladding structure may be
designed with air hole rings of gradually increasing radii
resembling a graded index fiber [14]. However, this may
not be a practical choice due to the complexity in the
fabrication of the fiber.
Another important design aspect is the number of rings
of the PCF. Increasing the number of rings can increase
the gain as it reduces the mode field diameter (MFD) but
the fiber size is also increased [15]. Proper results are yet
to be established as to find out the optimum number of
rings. Comparison of EDFA gain versus input pump
power for different pitch values of the PCF with that of
an equivalent SIF (a = 0.75 m) as per our simulations is
shown in fig. 1. The diameter of the air holes in each case
is taken as 0.8.
A comparison of different performance findings
through simulation is presented in Table 1. Pump
wavelength in all these simulations is 980 nm. FEM is the
most commonly used simulation technique to compute
mode field profiles as it is an accurate method which can
simulate even air holes of any arbitrary geometry. The
plane wave expansion (PWE) method is also used by
researchers. Rate equations are solved numerically using
Runge Kutta method.
B. Experimental Findings
Fabrication of photonic crystal fibers has not yet done
on a very large scale as compared to the SIFs. However,
several results of experimentation with PCFs are reported
in the literature. PCFs score high over SIFs, due to their
extreme characteristics such as very high or very low
Figure 1. Comparison of performance of EDFA using PCFs and SIF
SHORT PAPER
International Journal of Recent Trends in Engineering, Vol 2, No. 7, November 2009
TABLE I.
SIMULATION RESULTS OF PCF EDFA PERFORMANCE
Sr. Signal
Type Design Geometry
No. Wavelength
1 IG PCF 0.75 m, d= 0. 8 1550 m
2 PBG 1.67 m, d= 0.41 1560 nm
3 IG PCF 2.0 m, d= 1.0 m 1533 nm
4 Cladding 8 m, 1536 nm
pumped doped core 7.6 m
mode areas, very high or very low numerical aperture etc.
But these features also make the coupling of PCFs to
SIFs a challenging job. Coupling loss between the PCF
and the telecommunication fiber which is an SIF is an
important issue. Presently, this problem is solved by
using a high numerical aperture (NA) SIF between the
PCF and the telecommunication fiber [16].
The very first experimental demonstration of PCFs in
EDFA is done by T. Kogure et al in 2003 [16]. An
amplifier with a gain of about 44 dB is reported using IG
PCF and this amplifier is further used in a ring laser with
a tuning range in excess of 100 nm. These results are
refined and an internal gain efficiency of greater than 8.5
dB/mW is reported in 2004 [5]. Cladding pumping is
used to get low cost EDFAs for wave length division
multiplexing (WDM) application. A cladding pumped
PCF EDFA using double clad PCF to have a high NA is
reported in Ref. [17]. The coupling loss is reduced to 0.15
dB by an optimized fusion splicing between the SIF and
PCF. Eight WDM channels have been demonstrated to
show an output power of 32.6 dBm.
V. CONCLUSION
PCFs are proving to be better alternatives to SIFs in
the design of EDFA. Their performance parameters are
being studied through modeling and simulations. A few
experimental results are also reported in the literature. A
brief summary of such efforts is presented. Through
further research and experimentation, PCF based EDFAs
may be expected to be commercially deployed in the near
future.
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2009 ACADEMY PUBLISHER
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Reference
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