Super-High-Speed Lightwave Demodulation using the Nonlinearities of an Avalanche Photodiode

Even though the modulating signal frequency of the light is too high to detect directly, the signal can be extracted by frequency conversion at the same time as the detection by means of the non-linearity of the APD. An analysis is presented for super-high-speed optical demodulation by an APD with electronic mixing. A normalized gain is defined to evaluate the performance of the frequency conversion demodulation. The nonlinear effect of the internal capacitance was included in the small signal circuit analysis. We showed theoretically and experimentally that the normalized gain is dependent on the down converted difference frequency component. In the experiment, the down converted different frequency outputs became larger than the directly detected original signal for the applied local signal of 20㏈m.