A new approach to the design of LED based Gb/s digital fiber optic link

Abstract

A local area fiber optic network operating at rates above 1.25 Gb/s using LED as the optical transmitter and a novel receiver/clock recovery was developed. A LED driver circuit has been designed to compensate for the bandwidth roll-off of the LED above 500 MHz by means of an active current shaping network. Since the conventional approaches to the receiver/clock recovery circuit consumes power in range of watts, a low power consuming design method is also presented, which extracts the clock signal from ECL compatible data stream above Gb/s. Its performance is evaluated through a 1.25 Gb/s LED-based fiber optic transmission experiment.<>