ElectroOptical Innovations News

EOI Has New Premises:
160 North State Road, Suite 203, Briarcliff Manor, NY

I'm happy to announce that as of July 1, 2011, EOI is now in larger and more convenient space, still in Briarcliff. As you can see in this photo tour, it provides a much larger lab area as well as a library/storage area and a second office for visitors and perhaps a colleague.

New Product: PH200 Nanowatt Photoreceiver

Besides the do-it-yourself photoreceivers below, I am introducing a new line of electro-optical products in cooperation with Highland Technology, a cutting-edge instruments company in San Francisco. The first product is a shot-noise limited free space photoreceiver with quantum-limited sensitivity from 60 nW to 100 μW and an honest 1 MHz bandwidth (3 MHz on the 100 μW range). For photocurrents below a microamp, it's significantly better than even the bootstrapped cascode, and it comes in a nice module that fits your setup easily and has normal normal 1/4-20 and M6 threaded mounting holes.

It doesn't have some microscopic photodiode, either; the photosensitive area is 7 sq. mm, making alignment pretty easy even with very weak beams.

It uses a novel photon-coupled architecture, i.e. it's a current feedback design based on an interesting new wrinkle on the optocoupler. Normally the feedback photocurrent has full shot noise, but the PH200 has some circuit tricks inside that actually suppress the shot noise of the feedback photocurrent by 3 dB, resulting in truly shot noise limited overall performance for the unit, as you can see from the plot--asymptotically the SNR is within 1.8 dB of the input signal's shot noise.