Giga-bit optical receiver for plastic optical fibre

An optical receiver with high sensitivity and linearity specially designed for Giga-bit communications over small-bandwidth high-attenuation multimode plastic optical fiber is presented. An automatic gain control transimpedance amplifier and linear post amplifiers are used to maintain a good performance with multilevel modulation. Using multilevel signaling and large-diameter integrated photodiodes make the presented optical receiver suitable for large core plastic optical fiber. For a wavelength of 675 nm, a sensitivity of -26.3 dB m (BER = 10(-9)) at 500 Mb/s is presented by a binary signal. A data rate of I Gb/s and a sensitivity of -19.8 dB m (BER = 10(-9)) are achieved with four-level pulse amplitude modulation. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.