Comparison on the Sensitivity of Fiber-Optic SONET OC-48 PIN-TIAs Measured by Using Synchronous Modulation Intermixing Technique and Bit Error Rate Tester

A novel synchronous modulation and intermixing (SMIM) technique is presented to measure the sensitivity and evaluate the bit error rate (BER) of p-i-n photodiode receivers with transimpedance amplifiers (PIN-TIAs) without using any BER tester (BERT). When using the SMIM technique, the premier receiving measurement performance from the data rates of the synchronous optical network OC-3 to OC-48 was demonstrated. For general TO-46 packaged PIN-TIAs, a minimum intermixed voltage of 12.5 mV obtained by the SMIM method is equivalent to a sensitivity of -31 dBm at a requested BER of <10^-10 determined by BERT. The relationship between the monitoring voltage and the BER of the optical pattern received by the PIN-TIA and limited amplifier is estimated. The error of the measured voltage is 0.28 mV, which corresponds to the error sensitivity of 0.09 dB. This would show the accuracy of the simplified and low-cost SMIM technique for in situ diagnostics on a mass-production line