Optical Amplifier

The compact WaveDaemon optical amplifier offers a small footprint and high degree of component integration. It offers designers of metropolitan and access optical networks an economical source of signal gain to overcome losses associated with emerging network architectures. Designed to compensate for lossy optical components in interconnection-rich optical networks, the amplifier offers 10 dB of optical gain with 13 dBm of saturated power and low noise figure within the DWDM-capable 1550-nm band. Its 37 mm x 18 mm x 102 mm package incorporates an integrated pump laser, pump coupler and optional input and output isolators.

Unlike long-haul fiber optic links, emerging metropolitan optical networks rarely have long fiber runs that require conventional high-gain EDFAs, but their relatively complex architectures require several cascaded optical components to branch, route and switch lightpaths. To overcome the losses caused by these components, a lower gain, lower cost "amplet" like this one is frequently required.

The amplifier uses proprietary waveguide technology to accomplish a high degree of component integration in a small package. This design not only reduces the cost of gain, but also enables the construction of amplifiers from gain materials outside the standard 1550-nm window, according to the company. In addition to metropolitan and other optical networks, the amplifier is suitable for hybrid-fiber-coax CATV systems, networking testbeds and instrumentation applications where a moderate amount of gain is required.