Our connected society depends more than ever on both optical fiber and electrical networks that use signals encoded into light to transmit data, voice or video. With the ever-growing demand for faster Internet and telecom services, components using optical fiber, such as optical amplifiers, dispersion compensators and fiber Bragg gratings, are essential for the telecommunications market.
Optical amplifiers are the active components in a telecommunications systems enabling the transmission of data over the distance. As the requirements for telecommunications networks are growing, optical amplifiers require more power in order to transmit the information farther.
The choice of optical fiber plays an important part in the design of an effective optical amplifier. In fact, low background loss, high QCE and high absorption are key parameters to take into consideration.
With the increase of power in the amplification system, optical attenuators are used in order to level the signal sent from the transmitter to the receiver as the signal may be too strong and would create multi-channel noise. Coractive is a world leader in the manufacture of attenuating fiber for such telecom networks.
Fiber Bragg grating (FBG) and dispersion compensator technologies are widely used in WDM systems for the telecommunications market. FBGs are used for stabilizing the wavelength of pumps or sources, monitoring the signal quality of optical transmission’s lines in datacom applications or as back reflectors in laser resonators. Dispersion compensators are used in order to compensate the dispersion of the signal between two fiber amplifiers. This occurs when the signal is transmitted over a long distance in applications such as FTTH.