High-speed Optical Burst-mode Receiver

Recently, the use of burst mode data transmission is increasing in digital communication systems. These systems use point-to-point and point-to-multipoint connections over optical fiber, wireless and coaxial media. The engineers in the most countries are working on local-access approaches using time-division-multiple-Access (TDMA) technology. The network architectures of point-to-multipoint and the working model of TDMA make the upstream data work in burst mode.The difference in optical power and phase alignment between incoming data packets is very large, the traditional receivers can not handle this type dada instantaneously. To realize burst mode reception, some special technologies must be used—the burst mode optical receiver is adopted in our design. There are two key issues to be resolved in developing burst-mode optical receiver: reshape and instantaneous clock recovery. Special attention is devoted to the first issue in this paper regardless whether synchronized sampling is used or not. Burst mode receivers have been classified according to the way the threshold is set : a feed-forward type and feedback type .In this paper, We provide the unified design and simulation of the two types burst mode receiver at bit rates up to 1.25Gb/s , which included the photodiode model, dc-coupled preamplifiers, peak detector circuit and the limiting amplifiers. Finally, the two type burst mode receiver circuits are presented completely. The receivers simulated could be fabricated completely in silicon bipolar technology. The model of photodiode is given in the paper. To increase the receiver dynamic range, we chose TIA (trans-impedance amplifier) as preamplifier. Peak detector circuit is a fast adaptive detector circuit, and the limiting amplifier involves two stage differential amplifiers. The analysis presented indicates: At bit rates 1.25Gb/s, the feed-forward receiver sensitivity is -20dBm, dynamic range up to 20dB, the guard time between two packets is 20ns. The feedback receiver sensitivity is -21dBm, dynamic range 18dB, the guard time between two packets is 12ns. Finally, some unit circuits of the feed-forward receiver were demonstrated. An experimental burst mode source designed was also illustrated. The measured sensitivity was -24dBm at 155Mb/s, the peak detector efficiency was about 70%.