Comparison and analysis between APD and PIN functionality in an optical communication system

In fiber optic communication, many factors affect the quality of the system which causes less desirable communication by clients between two optical networks. Therefore, optimizations of these systems become inevitable for telecommunication engineers. In this project, a performance comparison of the conventional PIN Photodiode with the APD photodiode in an optical communication system is presented. The effects of gain, extinction ratio, shot noise, thermal noise and responsivity are compared and studied in details. Set-up optimized optical transmission system with the best performance simulates for this project in terms of performance parameters using OptiSystem software. APD Photodetectors have been shown as the better candidate for communication system than PIN Photodetectors, due to their internal gain availability. In PIN Photodiode, thermal noise plays the dominant role in the performance of the receiver. In the APD, both the thermal and shot noise is significant. It was shown that the Maximum Q-Factor produced by each detector is heavily affected by both thermal and shot noise in the APD. The more responsivity increase then the Maximum Q-Factor increase for both APD and PIN. However, responsivity automatically increases as multiplication gain increases because multiplication process multiplies the number of electron generated