Abstract

The use of optics has been proposed as a technique to improve the performance of a variety of switching systems. In one scenario, large numbers of optical receivers and transmitters would be directly integrated onto semiconductor processing elements, as a means to reduce the communication problems of such elements. [1] In such a scheme, the receiver unit is particularly worthy of careful study, since it carries with it certain constraints on area and power consumption that are not generally present in other types of optical receivers. Accordingly, we have studied of the bit-error rate (BER) performance of one type of receiver being used in such systems, the diode-clamped optical receiver. This receiver is a high-impedance FET-based digital receiver whose basic operation has been described previously. [2, 3]

© 1995 Optical Society of America