Influence of the laser turn-on delay jitter on BER performance in telecommunication links

Paper presents the analysis of sensitivity penalty induced by turn-on delay jitter resulting from subthreshold biasing of directly modulated semiconductor laser. Modelling of the laser turn-on delay used in the analysis assumes that Auger process dominates the recombination of carriers in the subthreshold region. Bit error rate calculation were performed for different modulation speeds and biasing conditions. The change of the received signal mean value was also taken into account. Obtained results show that subthreshold biasing of semiconductor lasers is possible with reasonable sensitivity penalty even for data rates as high as 2.5 Gb/s and that it is generally not a problem for data rates below 622 Mb/s.