Low-Cost and High-Integration Optical Time Domain Reflectometer using CMOS Technology

Abstract

This paper describes the design of application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technology for optical time domain reflectometer (OTDR) which is used for optical signal transmission and reception. Conventional OTDR products are implemented with discrete integrated circuit (IC) devices. However, these configurations are vulnerable to noise, leading to the limitation to achieving high dynamic range (DR) and signal to noise ratio (SNR). In addition, it is difficult to lower power consumption and cost, since each IC requires its own power consumption with large area. Therefore, we propose a high-DR OTDR that shows low power consumption and small chip area. The proposed OTDR chip is fabricated with a 350nm 2-poly 4-metal CMOS process and the area iss 5mm × 4mm. The measurement results show that power consumption of analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is under 100μW with 3.3V of the power supply.