By optimizing the structure of erbium-doped fibers, high efficiency such as a gain coefficient of 6.3dB/mW, or a slope efficiency of 92.6% have been realized with very flat wavelength dependence. Though the optimized structure has high NA, the splice loss with standard fibers can be lowered by the additional arc technique. The carbon coated fiber with a fatigue parameter over 150 guarantees the reliability, even when wounded on a small coil. In-line isolators and WDM couplers have been also developed. An amplifier module has been assembled, resulting in an output power more than +16dBm owing to the high performance of each component.

Wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) transmission systems have been intensely researched in order to increase the transmission capacity. One of the most important key devices for this use is erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) which feature a flattened gain, a high pumping efficiency and a low noise figure (NF), simultaneously. To fulfill these requirements, hybrid silica-based EDFAs (EDSFAs) composed of Al codoped and P/Al codoped EDSFs have been proposed so far. They are also attractive from the viewpoint of productivity, reliability, and cost-effectiveness. On the other hand, the optical bandwidth has been around 15 nm at most. In this paper, we have proposed newly designed hybrid EDSFAs for more than 25 nm optical bandwidth. The gain peak around 1. 53 µm can be suppressed through the saturation degree control in both EDSFs. The remaining obstacle is the diparound 1. 54 µm, which results in the relative gain non-uniformity of 10. 7% over the wavelength range from 1535 to 1560 nm. Owing to the glass composition optimization, the relative gain non-uniformity has been reduced to 5.8% without gain equalizers(GEQs), which is comparable to that of EDFFAs. As another solution, the hybrid EDSFA including two-stage Fabry Perot etalons as the GEQ has been proposed. In this configuration, the hybrid EDSFA has been designed to exhibit the gain profile similar to the summation of two sinusoidal curves, and the relative gain non-uniformity has been reduced to 3. 7%, which is almost equal to that of the hybrid EDFAs composed of EDSF and EDFF. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that newly developed hybrid EDSFAs exhibit a higher pumping efficiency and a lower NF than EDFFAs and hybrid EDSF/EDFFAs.