Power penalty due to decision-time jitter in receivers using avalanche photodiodes

Abstract

Power penalties on receiver sensitivity due to the presence of timing jitter are derived for receivers incorporated with PIN detectors and with avalanche photodiodes. It is shown that the presence of timing jitter will lower the optical gain of the avalanche photodiodes and will reduce the improvement in receiver sensitivity of using avalanche photodiodes over PIN detectors. Using computer simulation on results of transmission experiments it is shown that the receiver sensitivity can be degraded by several decibels owing to the presence of timing jitter in the Anritsu pulse pattern generator and/or error detector.