Capacitive loading of optical/electronic wavelength selector for WDMA networks

The authors report the system penalty incurred by an optical-to-electronic wavelength selector that is based on sharing one of several wavelength channels by a single transimpedance amplifier through MESFET switches. It was found that for a system penalty of 1 dB, four metal-semiconductor-metal photodetectors can share a single transimpedance amplifier, whereas for a 2 dB penalty the number is eight.