Abstract

A traditional optical to electrical receiver consists of a simple PIN diode followed by a number of electrical signal processing elements, which are required to detect and decode the incoming optical signal. The speed of the data on the optical fiber is limited by the bandwidth of these electrical signal processing devices, which is typically only a small fraction of the available bandwidth on the optical fiber. With the recent advent of practical optical amplifiers it is now feasible to implement a number of the important receiver functions in the optical domain prior to detection by the PIN diode without a loss in receiver sensitivity. By implementing these functions optically we can simplify the electrical section of the receiver and thus increase its bandwidth and yield significant gains in the transmission rate.

© 1994 IEEE