Pre-amp EDFA Noise Analysis for Optimal Optical Receiver Performance

In fiber optic communication systems, a pre-amp Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifier (EDFA) is used at the input of the optical receiver to increase the receiver sensitivity by amplifying the photon detector incoming optical signal. In this text, the pre-amp EDFA noise performance was characterized first at the pre-amp level through modeling using computer simulations. Then, the pre-amp noise performance was characterized experimentally at the optical receiver level. This work demonstrates that simulations and experiments together provide the optimization of the pre-amp EDFA performance. The experimental work of presented here focuses on the pre-amp EDFA noise performance characterization and analysis at the optical receiver level. This is the ultimate performance characterization method for the pre-amp EDFA, and it was performed through testing the optical receiver transmission performance under different pre-amp operating conditions.