Bismuth-doped fiber amplifiers (BDFA) to extend O-band transmission reach and capacity (Conference Presentation)

We developed a family of silica-based BDFAs operating over telecom O-band (1260-1360 nm). We demonstrated that 80 meters long single pump single stage amplifier can provide up to 19 dB gain, 20 dBm output power with 5 dB noise figure and 20% power conversion efficiency over 80 nm bandwidth (6-dB). The amplifier gain peak can be flexibly centered over 1305-1325 nm by pump wavelength selection. We designed simple BDFA operating over IEEE standardized part of the O-band (1272-1310 nm) and demonstrated that it can extend 425 Gb/s 400GBASE-LR8 transmission (eight 26.6 Gbaud/s PAM-4 channels) beyond 50 km of G.652 fiber.