NEW HIGH-SPEED MEASUREMENT COLLABORATION.

NIST is creating a "High-Speed Measurement Laboratory." This laboratory will develop calibratable highspeed electrical and optoelectronic measurements for next-generation optical telecommunications, electrical phase standards for nonlinear and other microwave measurements, and high-speed digital integrated circuits.

The laboratory already boasts one success, the development of an electro-optic sampling system for characterizing the magnitude and phase response of fast photoreceivers to 30 GHz. This is significant not only because this unique measurement system is fully calibratable but because it can be extended to the much higher frequencies critical to the optical telecommunications market. The next target is photoreceiver characterization over a 100 GHz bandwidth, which NIST scientists hope to achieve later this year to aid the development of the new 40 GB/s optical links.

But high-speed photodetector characterization isn't the only objective. A photoreceiver with one or two hundred GHz of calibrated bandwidth has many applications. These very fast photoreceivers can be used as transfer standards to establish absolute electrical phase, a critical quantity required for nonlinear device characterization at microwave frequencies, and to push calibrated temporal measurements to microwave frequencies, creating a new microwave-measurement paradigm.