Optical and RF Metrology for 5G

Specification standards will soon be available for 5G mobile RF communications. What optical and electrical metrology is needed or available to support the development of the supporting optical communication systems? Device measurement, digital oscilloscope impairments and improving system resolution are discussed.Comment: 2017 IEEE Photonics Society Summer Topical Meeting Series (SUM

Characterization of high-speed balanced photodetectors

We report the characterization of a balanced ultrafast photodetector. For this purpose, we use a recently developed time-domain laser-based vector network analyzer (VNA) to determine the common-mode rejection ratio (CMRR) of the device under test. This includes the frequency-domain response above the single-mode frequency of the coaxial connector. Although the balanced photodetector has a nominal bandwidth of 43 GHz, it generates voltage pulses with frequency components up to 180 GHz. We obtain a CMRR of better than 30 dB up to 70 GHz and better than 20 dB up to 110 GHz. The laser-based measurements are compared with the measurements using a digital sampling oscilloscope and with the frequency-domain measurements using a conventional VNA. We obtain good agreement between the three techniques with the laser-based method providing the largest measurement bandwidth, although it also constitutes the most complicated characterization setup