Quickstart
Supply +VCC pin with a voltage between 5.5 V and 9 V. Supply -VCC pin with a voltage between -9 V and -5.5 V. The board is regulated to ±5 V internally. Using more than ±6 V supplies increases power consumption without any significant improvement in supply noise rejection.
Feed the SMA input with a maximum of 45 µA. The linear output voltage range of the transimpedance amplifier is between -3.6 V and 3.6 V.
The output is available on the SMA connector (50 Ω impedance).
Interfacing photodiodes to the PD10TIA
The PD10TIA is designed to be used with external photodiodes. Here is the recommended way to interface the photodiodes with the PD10TIA using a coaxial cable.
On the diagrams Cd and Ccoax represent the parasitic capacitance of the photodiode and the coaxial cable, respectively.
Single-ended detector
Balanced detector
Coaxial cable length and input capacitance
The input capacitance is Cin = Cd + Ccoax for a single-ended detector and Cin = 2 Cd + Ccoax for a balanced one. The PD10TIA-80-DC is stable with input capacitances up to 2 nF.
For a typical 50 Ω coaxial cable, the capacitance per unit of length is 1 pF / cm. Note that no specific characteristic impedance is required for the input coaxial cable.
The input capacitance mostly influences the noise performance of the amplifier. For example, we built a balanced detector using a pair of photodiodes with 0.9 A / W sensitivity and Cd = 5 pF. We measured the noise equivalent power without and with a 2 meter-long coaxial cable (Ccoax = 1 pF / cm x 200 cm = 200 pF):
