STAR COUPLERS WITH GAIN USING FIBER AMPLIFIERS

In this letter, we propose a novel technique for constructing large passive star couplers with gain using high-power erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDF). In contrast to other proposed techniques [5], [6] where each output port of the coupler requires its own EDF amplifier, the proposed alternative requires few EDF amplifiers with sufficient output saturation power levels. When used in an FDM/WDM star network, the size of the coupler can be increased by a factor of m using m narrowband EDF amplifiers. Moreover, this alternative avoids coupling the pump-laser light through the star coupler itself, alleviating the requirement on designing large bandwidth couplers to accommodate the signal and the pump wavelengths.