Electronics

What Photodetector Should I Use for Application 'X'?

June 23, 2021 — updated November 11, 2021

We often get asked questions like, “How do I know what photodetector is best for (application X)?” For some values of X, it’s pretty simple: if you’ve got milliwatts of visible light, use a silicon PIN photodiode and an ordinary transimpedance amp (TIA) made from an op amp or (for faster things) a packaged 50-ohm RF amplifier. It’s usually easy to verify that you’re in the shot noise limit—if your photocurrent drops more than 50 mV across its load impedance, you’re there. (*)

Good Books

December 10, 2019 — updated September 7, 2021

Classic Books On Electro-Optics and Circuits In Softcopy

There’s also the 100 Good Books

list from Building ElectroOptical Systems

Books on Electro-Optics

  1. Photomultipliers: Their Cause And Cure Part 1
  2. Photomultipliers: Their Cause And Cure Part2 And Front Matter
  3. RCA Photomultiplier Handbook
  4. RCA Electro-Optics Handbook (1974)
  5. “The Intensity Interferometer” by R. Hanbury Brown

MIL-HDBK-141: Optical Design

  1. Table of Contents through Chapter 6 (pdf)
  2. Chapters 7 through 12 (pdf)
  3. Chapters 13 through 16 (pdf)
  4. Chapters 17 through 20 (pdf)
  5. Chapters 21 through 23 (pdf)
  6. Chapter 24 through Index (pdf)

And, courtesy of the good folks at Any2DJVU:

Lab Equipment List

December 10, 2019 — updated December 19, 2019

Here’s a partial list of EOI’s lab equipment. The list is heavily weighted towards electronic stuff, but we also have a very complete set of high precision optical and optomechanical parts: mounts, translation and rotation stages, lenses, prisms, polarization optics, gratings, filters, modulators, detectors, lasers, and fibres, for a start. This lets us try out new ideas quickly and build test setups to verify them.

If you’re also a fan of classical equipment, you can download manuals at Keysight (formerly Agilent, formerly HP) and Tektronix, liberatedmanuals.com, BAMA, Kurt’s Manuals, ElektroTanya.com, and K04BB. KE5FX’s GPIB Tools are pretty serviceable and also free.   (NB: Keysight for some reason doesn’t allow deep links to their support pages—you have to go through the main page and select “support”.)