In this paper, we present a novel erbium–ytterbium doped fiber amplifier (EYDFA) + Raman + EYDFA hybrid optical amplifier (HOA) for a super-dense wavelength division multiplexing (SD-WDM) system application. The performance of the 100-channel system has been investigated for an overall data rate and channel spacing of 100[Formula: see text]Gb/s and 0.4[Formula: see text]nm, respectively, over a wavelength span of 1550–1589.9[Formula: see text]nm. HOA has been optimized for Raman length, EYDFA lengths, pump powers and Er[Formula: see text] concentrations to achieve high average gain and low gain variation ratio of 40.41[Formula: see text]dB and 0.40[Formula: see text]respectively. The optimized configuration of the proposed HOA has been compared with EYDFA + Raman and Raman + EYDFA HOA configurations. The achieved high and flat gain with an acceptable output optical signal to noise ratio (OSNR) in case of EYDFA + Raman + EYDFA HOA; makes it an optimum choice for SD-WDM systems.