| 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. As a result of this amplification process, the performance of the photon detector is degraded by the pre-amp noise. So, it is important to characterize the pre-amp noise at the optical receiver level and relate the pre-amp noise performance to the optical receiver transmission performance.; In this dissertation, 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 dissertation demonstrates that simulations and experiments together provide the optimization of the pre-amp EDFA performance. The experimental work of this dissertation focused 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. |
