Presented By:

SUNEEL MIRIYALA M.Tech.

 Optical Fiber System

Tx system type depends on:

• Analog or Digital

• Acceptable system fidelity specified in terms of received BER for digital systems or
received SNR and signal distortion for analog systems

• Required transmission bandwidth

• Acceptable spacing between the repeaters

• Cost & Reliability

 Optical Transmitter Circuit
• The unique properties and characteristics of the injection
laser and the LED which make them attractive sources for
optical fiber communications.
• Both the devices exhibit a number of similarities in terms of
their general performance and compatibility with optical
fibers.
• It is useful to consider these differences, as well as the
limitations of the two source types, prior to discussion of
transmitter circuits for various applications.
 Source Limitations

• Power
• Linearity
• Thermal behavior
• Speed of response
• Spectral width.
Power

• Coupling efficiencies are 30%, it can be

extended to 80% with a suitable lens
arrangement
• The LED gives poor coupling efficiency 10%
due wider line width of the emitted light.
• From the figure:
• The o/p power emitted into air as a function of
D.C. drive current for a typical high radiance LED
and Laser.
• The curve exhibit nonlinearity at high currents
due to junction heating.
 Linearity
• Linearity of the optical o/p power against current characteristic is an
important consideration with both Laser and LED.
• In analog optical fiber comm. systems where source non linearity's may
cause severe distortion of the transmitted signal.
• LED’s are ideally suitable for analog transmission as the o/p is
approximately proportional to the drive current.
• In practical cases LED’s may display some degree of non-linearity in their
o/p against current characteristic because of junction heating effects.
• The etched well surface emitters LED may display good linearity.
• By using digital transmission, especially utilizing a binary format, is far
less sensitive to source nonlinearities and is therefore often preferred
when using both laser and LED’s.
 Thermal Behavior
• The thermal behavior of both laser and LEDs can limit their operation within
the optical transmitter.
• Due to increase in threshold current the temperature problems are comes
into picture in a Laser.
• Threshold currents of typical AlGaAs device increase by approximately 1% per
degree centigrade increase in junction temperature.
• Hence any significant increase in the junction temp. may cause loss of lasing
and subsequent dramatic reduction in optical o/p power.
• This limitation cannot be overcome by simply cooling the device on a heat
sink, but must me taken into account with the transmitter design, through the
incorporation of optical feed back, in order to obtain a constant optical o/p
power level from the device.
• Most LEDs exhibit a decrease in optical o/p power following an increase in
junction temperature, which is typically around -1% per degree centigrade.
 Speed of Response
• The speed of response of the two types of optical sources is dependent
on respective radiative emission.
• The LED is dependent on the effective minority carrier life time in the
semiconductor material .
• In heavily doped GaAs this is typically between 1 and 10nsec.

• The rise time of LED is at least twice the effective minority carrier life
time, and often much longer because of junction and stray capacitance.
• The LEDs are used for low band width applications (7-175 MHz)

• Stimulated emission from lasers occurs over a much shorter period giving
good rise times of the order of 0.1-1 ns, thus allows a band width of
1GHz..
• The injection Laser performance is limited by device switch-on-delay.To
achieve high speeds, we can reduce switch- on-delay.
 Spectral width
• The finite spectral width of the optical source causes pulse
broadening due to material dispersion on an optical fiber
communication link.
• This results in a limitation on the bandwidth-length product
which may be obtained using a particular source fiber.
• The width of the light beam is high, then there is a possibility
for occurrence of the pulse broadening.
• To overcome this pulse broadening effect, we can maintain the
light beam with narrow width
 LED Drive Circuits

• The only advantage of LED is easy to operate over more

powerful, higher speed laser.
• The circuit configurations that may be used to convert the
information voltage signal at the transmitter into a
modulation current suitable for an led source.
 Digital Transmission
• The operation of LED for binary digital
transmission requires the switching on and off of
a current in the range of several tens to several
hundreds of mA.
• This must be performed at high speed in
response to logic voltage levels at the driving
circuit input.
• A common method of achieving this current
switching operation for an led is shown in fig..
• The circuit illustrated uses a bipolar transistor
switch operated in the common emitter
configuration mode.
• This single stage circuit provides current gain as
well as giving only a small voltage drop across
the switch when the transistor is in
saturation()i.e., when collector – base junction is
FB, the emitter to collector voltage is 0.3V).
 Digital Transmission
• The max. current flow through the led is limited by the
resistor R2 whilst independent bias to the device may
be provided by the incorporation of resistor R3.
• The switching speed of the common emitter
configuration is limited by space charge and diffusion
capacitance.
• The increased switching speed may be obtained from an
led without a pulse shaping or speed-up element by use
of low impedance driving circuit, where as changing the
space charge the diffusion capacitance occurs rapidly..
 Logic Interfacing for Digital Tx.
• A frequent requirement for digital transmission is the interfacing of the LED by
drive circuit with a common logic family.
• The Texas instrument driver provides a drive current of 60 mA to the LED when
R1 is 50 ohms.
 Optical Receiver Circuit

• The linear conversion of received optical signal into an electrical current

at the detector, it is amplified to obtain suitable signal level.
• The initial amplification is done at the pre-amplifier ckt., where as
additional noise is kept minimum in order to avoid corruption of the
received signal.
• The main amplifier provides additional low noise amplification of the
signal to give an increased signal level.
• The equalizer may precede or follow the main amplifier or may be
incorporated in the functions of amplifier and filter.
• The received optical signal may be distorted due to dispersive
mechanisms. Hence to compensate this distortion and to provide a
suitable signal shape using the filter
 Pre Amplifier
• The choice of circuit configuration for the pre amplifier is largely dependent upon the
system application.
• The common emitter or source, the common base or gate, and the emitter or source
follower for the BJT and FET are used to construct the Pre-amplifier.
• There are three basic pre-amplifier structures. They are low impedance, high
impedance and transimpedance front end.
• There are significant differences between the p-i-n and avalanche photo diode which
must be consider within the design of the receiver…
Pre Amplifier
 Pre - Amplifier
• The high Impedance front end structure has two major draw
backs. They are
• There is no perfect equalization
• This approach suffers from lack of dynamic range..
Multiplexing
 WDM
• Wave Division Mutiplexing (WDM) multiplexes multiple optical carrier
signals on a single optical fiber by using different wavelengths (colors) of
laser light to carry different signals.
– Bit rate and protocol independent

GE WDM Fiber MUX

Independent SONET
opticial bit
rates
and formats

Fiber Channel

Fiber Cable
ATM
 Wavelength Division Multiplexing
• Multiple beams of light at different frequency
• Carried by optical fiber
• A form of FDM
• Each color of light (wavelength) carries separate data channel
• 1997 Bell Labs
– 100 beams
– Each at 10 Gbps
– Giving 1 terabit per second (Tbps)
• Commercial systems of 160 channels of 10 Gbps now available
• Lab systems (Alcatel) 256 channels at 39.8 Gbps each
– 10.1 Tbps
– Over 100km
 WDM
• Two main types of WDM:
– Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing (CWDM)
– Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM)

Feature CWDM DWDM

Wavelengths per fiber 8 – 16 40 – 80

Wavelength spacing 2500GHz (20nm) 100 GHz (0.8nm)

Wavelength capacity Up to 2.5 Gbps Up to 10 Gbps
Aggregate fiber capacity 20 – 40 Gbps 100 – 1000 Gbps
Overall cost Low Medium
Applications Enterprise, metro-access Access, metro-core,
regional
 WDM Operation
• Same general architecture as other FDM
• Number of sources generating laser beams at different
frequencies
• Multiplexer consolidates sources for transmission over single
fiber
• Optical amplifiers amplify all wavelengths
– Typically tens of km apart
• Demux separates channels at the destination
• Mostly 1550nm wavelength range
• Was 200MHz per channel
• Now 50GHz
 Dense Wavelength Division
Multiplexing
• DWDM
• No official or standard definition
• Implies more channels more closely spaced
that WDM
• 200GHz or less
 Benefits of WDM
• WDM technology allows multiple connections
over one fiber thus reducing fiber plant
requirement.
– This is mainly beneficial for long-haul applications.
– Campus applications require a cost benefit analysis.
• WDM technology can also provide fiber
redundancy.
• WDM provides a managed fiber service.
 Error Sources

• When there is no optical power incident on the photo detector a

small reverse leakage current still flows from the device terminals
• Thermal noise is mainly due to random nature of electrons.
• Frequencies since hf>KT and the quantum fluctuations dominate
over thermal fluctuation.
 P-N and P-I-N Photo Diode Receiver
• The two main sources of noise in photo diodes without internal gain are
dark current noise and quantum noise, both of which may be regarded
as shot noise on the photo current(analog quantum noise)
 Low Impedance Front End Receiver

• Three basic amplifier configurations are frequently used in optical fiber

comm. Receiver.
• The simplest and most common is the voltage amplifier with an effective
input resistance Ra.
• In order to make suitable design choices, it is necessary to consider both
band width and noise. The modified load resistance may be represented by
Attenuation loss Measurement
NA Measurement
RI Profile Measurement
Dispersion Measurement
 OTDR

An Optical Time Domain Reflectometer (OTDR)

is a fiber optic instrument used to characterize,
troubleshoot and maintain optical telecommunication
networks. OTDR testing is performed by transmitting
and analyzing pulsed laser light traveling through an
optical fiber. The measurement is said to be unidirectional
as the light is insert at extremity of a fiber optic cable link.

 OTDR is a measurement technique with wide applications in

laboratory..
 This technique is also called the backscatter measurement
method.
 It measure the attenuation.
 The OTDR is also allowed to calculate connector losses along
with attenuation loss measurement
DIM
Optical Splitter and Switches
Optical Switches