Research Information System
25th Signal Processing and Communications Applications Conference, SIU 2017, Antalya, Turkey, 15 - 18 May 2017
In this work, applicability to the optical communication systems of photodiodes realized with standard CMOS fabrication processes, which can be integrated to microelectronic systems at low costs. A photodiode fabricated with UMC 180 nm standard CMOS process on a silicon substrate within a 1.05 mm χ 1.00 mm area is experimented with as an optical receiver in a setup where LEDs of different visible wavelengths are used as sources. Performance of the CMOS photodiode was compared to that of a Thorlabs PDA10A-EC photodiode used as a reference. In the experiments, it was observed that the communication bandwidth of the reference photodiode is in the 0.87-1.68 MHz range and that the CMOS photodiode can achieve comparable bandwidths in the range of 0.70-1.37 MHz. A square wave of 200 kHz frequency can be carried via an optical communication system using the CMOS photodiode without suffering from significant distortions.