High electron mobility transistor lightwave receiver for broad-band optical transmission system applications

The design and construction of a broadband transimpedance lightwave receiver which features packaged, commercially available high-electron-mobility transistors is described. The receiver was constructed on a standard teflon printed circuit board with packaged tailed 30- mu m-diameter germanium avalanche photodiode as photodetector. A sensitivity of -25.5 dBm for 10/sup -9/ bit error rate was achieved at 1.31 mu m with a 5-Gb/s nonreturn-to-zero pseudorandom sequence provided by a commercial data generator and 1:4 analog demultiplexing at the receiver output. >