Laser Diode Evaluation for Optical Analog Link

This paper reports analytical and experimental work in evaluating AlGaAs heterojunction laser diodes and light-emitting diodes (LED) for utilization in analog optical links (in particular TV channels) employing optical fibers. The analytical work focuses on using the static transfer function to predict distortion, based-on curve fitting (Section C) and calculation of distortion components (Section B). The purpose is to avoid laborious frequency measurements. Also of interest is the determination of channel spacing (Section E) to avoid 2nd and 3rd order interference for devices (lasers and LED´s) with rather poor linearity.