Electrical Engineering Department

Faculty of Engineering
Alexandria University
Third Year: Communications Section
Course: Optical Devices (EE365)
Semester: Winter 2015

Lecturer: Dr. Ziad A. El-Sahn

Assistant: Eng. Mai Fouad

Lab 1 Light Emitting Diodes

Background
The mechanism by which light is emitted from a LED that the normally empty conduction band of
the semiconductor is populated by electrons injected into it by the forward current through the
junction, and light is generated when these electrons recombine with holes in the valence band to
emit a photon in an entirely random manner which is called Spontaneous emission.
The LED can therefore operate at lower current densities than the injection laser, but the emitted
photons have random phases and the device is an incoherent optical source. Also, the energy of the
emitted photons is only roughly equal to the band-gap energy of the semiconductor material, which
gives a much wider spectral line-width (possibly by a factor of 100) than the injection laser.
LED characteristics

Output spectrum (Wavelength-intensity relationship)

The spectral distribution of light sources affects the performance of optical communication systems
through fiber dispersion. The spectral distribution is governed by the spectrum of spontaneous
emission and typically follows a Gaussian shape. The output spectrum of a typical 1300 nm LED is
50 nm spectral width .the spectral width can be estimated using FWHM (the width of the spectral
pattern at its half power point)

Modulation response

The frequency response of an LED is determined by the carrier dynamics (and therefore is limited
by the electron lifetime n) and the parasitic capacitance of the LED (described by the RC constant
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RC) If a small, constant forward bias is applied, the influence of the parasitic capacitance of the LED
can be neglected. The LED 3-dB modulation optical bandwidth is defined as the modulation
frequency at the LED power transfer function is reduced by 3 dB. The LED 3-dB modulation optical
bandwidth could be expressed as:

Pre-Lab Exercise (Simulation)

Students are required to use OptiSystem (from Optiwave) software to implement a simple optical
communication system as shown below. Results will be handed in an individual hardcopy report on
the date of your lab and in the same session .
Electrical source
Pseudo-random bit
sequence generator
+ pulse generator

Optical source

LED
Transmitter

Optical receiver
PIN photodiode
+ Bessel low pass
filter
Receiver

`
Simulate the previous system then try to find the following requirements:
(1) Analyze the spectral width of the LED using optical spectrum analyzer (you may need to
adjust its resolution) at 1300 nm, bit rate is 300 Mb/s and samples per bit are 32768 .
(2) Calculate the 3 dB bandwidth theoretically and compare it with the simulation result using
an eye diagram analyzer at different bit rates (100 Mb/s, 300 Mb/s) and samples per bit are
256. Repeat using n = RC = 0.5 ns, what is meant by the eye diagram?
(3) Using parameter sweep to plot the LED output power versus carrier lifetime (or quantum
efficiency).

Lab Exercise
Draw The Light - Current (L-I) curve characterizes the emission properties of a Light emitting diode
(it shows the current that needs to be applied to obtain a certain amount of optical power),
comment on your results.

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