Versatile subnanosecond laser diode driver

This article presents a laser diode driver that provides a fast modulation of a laser beam. A pulsed current source was designed and built to test Infra-Red (I-R) receivers in the Time Domain (TD). The proposed solution allows to estimate pulse responses of various photodetectors, whereas the testing was performed with a PiN photodetector. The pulse response brings the information on the behavior of the device under test in a wide frequency range. In addition, an experimental application of the proposed method is presented too. System discussed in this paper has been fully designed and manufactured in Warsaw University of Technology (WUT) in Institute of Electronic Systems (ISE).