Spectrum-sliced fiber amplifier light source with a polarization-insensitive electroabsorption modulator

We report the measured SNR of both polarized and unpolarized ASE light of an EDFA spectrum-sliced with various optical bandwidths. The results were in a good agreement (<1 dB) with the theoretically calculated values. We also compared the BER performance of these light sources. When an unpolarized ASE source was used with a polarization-insensitive electroabsorption modulator, the equivalent optical bandwidth needed for error-free transmission of 1.7-Gb/s data was only 0.68 mm.<
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