Abstract

There is a need for ever increasingly accurate characterization of optical waveforms. The term accurate is quantified by a number of measures such as rise and fall time, extinction ratio, timing jitter, signal-to-noise ratio etc., the relative importance of each depending on the actual application being considered. The most important measure in many applications is the temporal resolution, but while being important this is not an independent quantity and it can be traded off among other quantitative measures such as the sensitivity.

© 2009 IEEE