Comparative study on temperature-dependent multichannel gain and noise figure distortion for 1.48- and 0.98-μm pumped EDFA's

Temperature dependence of multichannel gain flatness and noise figure (NF) was compared for different pump wavelengths of 1.48 and 0.98 μm on silica-based erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA's) through measurement-based numerical simulation. Owing to its temperature sensitive pump emission cross section, the 1.48-μm pumping showed greater temperature sensitivity (maximum 0.75-dB gain flatness distortion with 0.57-dB average gain level shift, 0.3-dB NF variation for 25 °C change) than the 0.98 μm pumping (maximum 0.5-dB gain flatness distortion with 0.015-dB average gain level shift, 0.05-dB NF variation for 25 °C change). However, it was also found that distortion ripple spectra mainly coming from the changes of signal cross sections and asymmetric gain temperature dependence necessitate compensation techniques in the EDFA link, irrespective of pump wavelength.