Vi Institute of Technology, Sirunkundram 603108.

EC2402 OPTICAL COMMUNICATION & NETWORKING Question Bank with Answers UNIT III SOURCES AND DETECTORS PART A 1. Mention any four required properties of light sources used in the optical communication. High radiance output Fast emission response time High quantum efficiency Dimensional characteristics compatible with those of optical fibers. 2. What are the laser light properties? How are they produced? o High radiance output o Fast emission response time o High quantum efficiency o Dimensional characteristics compatible with those of optical fibers. High radiance and high quantum efficiency are achieved through carrier and optical confinement using double hetero structure. 3. Why laser emission is not obtained in an atomic system under thermal equilibrium? In thermal equilibrium the density of excited electrons is very small. Most photons incident on the system will therefore be absorbed, so that stimulated emission is negligible, hence there is no laser emission. 4. What is meant by laser action? What are the conditions to achieve it? Laser action is the result of three key processes 1. Photon absorption 2. Spontaneous emission 3. Stimulated emission The conditions to achieve laser action are, 1. Magnitude of guided mode should be greater than the threshold value. 2. At the lasing threshold, a steady state oscillation takes place, and the magnitude and phase of the returned wave must be equal to those of the original wave. 5. What is meant by threshold condition for laser oscillation? Threshold condition for laser oscillation means that the pumping source that maintains population inversion must be sufficiently strong to support or exceed all the energy-consuming mechanisms within the lasing cavity. 6. What are direct band gap and indirect band semiconductors? (AU- MAY06, DEC06, DEC08) In direct band gap materials direct transition is possible from valence band to conduction band. e.g. GaAs, InP, InGaAs indirect band gap materials direct transition is not possible from valence band to conduction. e.g. silicon, germanium. 7. Mention the important semiconductors used in laser and LEDs. GaAs, InP, InGaAs GaAlAs 8. What are the drawbacks of homo-junction laser diodes? 1. No carrier confinement 2. No optical confinement

9. Define internal quantum efficiency of a LED (AU-DEC06) The internal quantum efficiency in the active region is the fraction of electron hole pairs that recombine radiatively. Its given by i=Rr/ (Rr+ Rnr) i is the internal quantum efficiency Rris the radiative recombination per unit volume. Rnr is the non radiative recombination rate 10. Why do we prefer laser diodes over LEDs for communication applications? 1. High intensity radiation 2. Narrow spectral width of the laser source is the preferable features of Laser compared to LED. 11. Why gain guided lasers are not used in practice? 1. Highly unstable 2. Highly astigmatic 12. What are the merits of index guided lasers? Index guided laser supporting only fundamental transverse mode and longitudinal mode is known single mode laser. Such a device emits a single well collimated beam of light having bell shaped Gaussian intensity profile. 13. Explain the radiation pattern from surface emitting laser diode or LED. The emission pattern is isotropic with a 120 degree half-power beam width, i.e., source is equally bright when viewed from any direction, but the power diminishes as cos, where is the angle between the viewing direction and normal to the surface 14. Mention any four factors which affect the power launched into the fiber. Numerical aperture Core size Refractive index profile Core and Cladding index difference Size, Radiance and angular power distribution of the source. 15. What are the required properties of photo detector? (AU-Nov 2007) 1. High response or Sensitivity 2. Minimum addition of noise 3. Fast response speed 4. Insensitive to variations in temperature 5. Compatibility with physical dimensions of fiber. 6. Long operating life. 7. Reasonable cost. 16. What are the different noises present in the avalanche photodiode? 1. Shot noise 2. Dark current noise 3. Surface leakage current noise 4. Thermal noise 17. What is dark current noise? The dark current noise arises from electrons and/or holes which are thermally generated in the PN junction of the photo diode. This current continues to flow through the bias circuit of the device when no light is incident on the photodiode. 18. What is avalanche multiplication noise? The shot noise and bulk dark current noise in a photo detector are multiplied by Avalanche gain mechanism. These multiplied noise are referred to Avalanche multiplication noise.

19. An APD generates a current of 100nA when the incident power is 5nW. The operating wavelength is 1.5 m. Find its responsivity. If the quantum efficiency is 0.7, find the multiplication factor. (AUDEC06) Ip= RPo = (q/hv) Po = (q/hc) Po = {(0.7)(1.6 x 10-19)(1.5 x 10-6)/(6.625 x 10-34 x 3 x 108)}5 x 10-9 = 4.263nA The multiplication factor(M) = Im / Ip = 100nA/4.263nA = 23.46. 20. What are the different factors that determine the response time of photo detector? i. The transit time of the photo carriers in the depletion region. ii. The diffusion time of the photo carriers generated outside the depletion region. iii. The RC time constant of the photodiode and its associated circuit. 21. Mention the important photo detector material. Why it is preferred? 1. InGaAs 2. InAlGaAs 22. What are the different components of an optical receiver? 1. Photo detector 2. Amplifier and 3. Signal processing circuitry. 23. Why do prefer digital transmission rather than the analog transmission? Digital transmission has several advantages over analog transmission: 1. Analog circuits require amplifiers, and each amplifier adds distortion and noise to the signal. Subsequent stages may amplify the incoming signal and noise as well. 2. In contrast, digital amplifiers regenerate an exact signal, eliminating cumulative errors. An incoming (analog) signal is sampled, its value is determined, and the node then generates a new signal from the bit value; the incoming signal is discarded. 3. Voice, data, video, etc. can all carried by digital circuits. 24. Define quantum efficiency of photo detector.(AU-DEC06,Apr-2008) It is defined as the number of the electron hole pairs generated per incident photon of energy hv.

PART-B
1. What are the differences between spontaneous and stimulated emission of radiation? OR Explain with necessary diagrams, three processes of absorption spontaneous emission and stimulated emission in a two level energy system. OR What do you understand by absorption, spontaneous emission emission in two level energy system. Ans.

(a) Absorption (b) Spontaneous emission (c) Stimulated emission. Consider an atomic system having two energy state E1 and E2. Let an atom is initially in lower energy state E1. When a photon with energy (E2 - E1) is incident on the atom it may be excited into the higher energy state E2 through absorption of the photon. Alternatively when the atom is initially in higher energy state E2 which is unstable state, it can make transition to lower energy state E1 providing the emission of a photon in two ways: (a) By spontaneous emission (b) By stimulated emission. (a) Spontaneous emission: In spontaneous emission atom returns to its lower energy state in random manner. In this emission photons are radiated in arbitrary directions. Very few photons create light in the desired direction. Photons propagate within a wide cone thus yield widespread radiated light. Radiation of photons is independent of other photons i.e. no phase correlation exists between different photons and total radiated light is incoherent. Spontaneous emission occurs in LED which has very wide spectral width. (b) Stimulated emission: When a photon having an energy equal to the energy difference between the two states (E2 E1) interacts with the atom in the upper energy state, it causes the atom to return to lower energy, state with the emission of second photon. In stimulated emission an external photon stimulates the induced emission. The stimulated photon propagates in the same direction as the photon that stimulated it so the stimulated light will be well directed. The stimulated radiation is coherent as stimulated photon is in time alignment with external photon. All stimulated photons propagate in the same direction and contribute to output light so the sources having stimulated emission have high current to light efficiency. LASER generally uses stimulated emission of radiation.

2. Derive an expression for internal quantum efficiency of LED`s and LEDpower. Ans. The internal quantum efficiency in the active region is the fraction of electronhole pairs that recombine radiatively. It is the ratio of the radiative recombination rate to total recombination rate

3. A double hetrojunction InGaASP LED emitting as a peak wavelength of 1310 nm has radiative and non-radiative recombination times of 25ns and 90 ns respectively. The device current is 35 mA. (a) Find the internal quantum efficiency and internal power level. (b) If the refractive index of the light source material is n = 3.5. Find the power emittedfrom the device.

UNIT IV FIBER OPTICAL RECEIVER AND MEASUREMENTS PART A 1. What are the requirements of an optical receiver? (AU-MAY06) a. Light detector b. Pre amplifier c. Equalizer d. Signal discriminator circuits 2. What are the requirements for a preamplifier? ii. Preamplifier bandwidth must be greater than or equal to signal bandwidth. iii. It must reduce all source of noise iv. It must have high receiver sensitivity. 3. Why do we prefer trans-impedance preamplifier rather than high impedance preamplifier? (AUMay07) Since the high impedance produces large input RC time constant, the front end bandwidth is less than the signal bandwidth. This drawback is overcome in the trans impedance preamplifier.

4. What are the main advantages of InGaAs photodiodes? 1. Wider operating wavelength range.(1100 to 1700nm) 2. High responsivity(0.75 to 0.95Amp/watts for PIN ) 3.Less dark current.(0.5 to 2nA) 4.Less rise time(0.05 to 0.5ns) 5.Lagerer bandwidth.(1 to 2GHz) 5. What are the various error sources in the optical receiver? Photon detection quantum noise Bulk dark current noise Surface leakage current Statistical gain fluctuation(for APD) Thermal noise Amplifier noise 6. Define probability of error. Write an expression for it. The probability of error is defined as Pe = a P1(vth) + bP0(vth) Where a and b are weighting factors P1(vth) Probability that the equalizer output voltage is less than vth when a logical one pulse is sent. P0(vth) - Probability that the equalizer output voltage exceeds vth when a logical zero pulse is transmitted. 7. Define quantum limit. (AU-MAY06, Nov 2007) It is possible to find the minimum received optical power required for a specific bit error rate performance in a digital system. This minimum received power level is known as quantum limit. 8. Define BER. An approach is to divide the number Ne of errors occurring over a certain time interval t by the number Ntof pulses transmitted during this interval. This is called either the error rate or the bit error rate. Bit error rate BER =Ne/Nt = Ne /Bt Where B= 1/Tb 9. A given APD has a quantum efficiency of 65%at a wavelength 900nm. If 0.5 W of optical power produces a multiplied photocurrent of 10 A, find the multiplication factor M (AU-MAY05) Ip= RPo = (q/hv) Po = (q/hc) Po = {(0.65)(1.6 x 10-19)(9 x 10-7)/(6.625 x 10-34 x 3 x 108)}5 x 10-7 = 0.235A The multiplication factor(M) = Im / Ip = 10A/0.235A = 43 10. Define Responsivity. (AU-DEC04, MAY05, DEC05, DEC08,APR08) R = Ip/P0 = q/h where Ip-average photocurrent generated P0- incident optical power level -quantum efficiency 11. Express quantum limit in terms of minimum power and S/N ratio at the receiver. Assume that an optical pulse of energy E falls on the photodetector in a time interval. This can only be interpreted by the receiver as a 0 pulse if no electron-hole pairs are generated with the pulse present. The probability that n = 0 electrons are emitted in a time interval is Pr(0) = e-N where the average number of electron-hole pairs(N).Thus for a given error probability Pr(0), we can find the minimum energy E required at a specific wavelength. 12. Compare the performance of APD and PIN diode (AU-Nov 2008) The avalanche photodiode (APD), is also reverse-biased. The difference with the PINdiode is that the absorption of a photon of incoming light may set off an electron-hole pair avalanche breakdown, creating up to 100 more electron-hole pairs. This feature gives the APD high sensitivity (much greater than the PINdiode).

13. Mention types of preamplifiers. (a) Low impedance preamplifiers (b) High impedance preamplifiers Transimpedance preamplifiers 14. What are the advantages of preamplifier? (a) low noise level (b) high bandwidth (c) high dynamic range (d) high sensitivity (e) high gain 15. What are the standard measurement techniques? (a) Reference test methods (b) Alternative test methods 16. Mention the different techniques used for measurement of fiber refractive profile (a) Interferometric Method (b) Near field scanning method (c) Refractive near field method 17. Define effective cutoff wavelength. The effective cutoff wavelength is defined as wavelength greater than the ratio between the total power to the launched higher order modes and fundamental mode power. 18. Mention the techniques used for determination of fiber numerical aperture. (a) Farfield angle from fiber using a scanning photo detector and a rotating stage (b) Farfield pattern by trigonometric fiber (c) Farfield pattern of NA measurement using a rotating stage. 19. List out the advantages of outer diameter measurement. (a) speed is large (b) more accuracy (c) faster diameter measurements (d) good accuracy.