Electronics on ElectroOptical Innovations

Photomultipliers: There's a Lot to Love

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 18:35:14 +0000

Placeholder for a PMT article on photon counting, low-current analogue mode vs. MPPCs, and the high linearity version

What Photodetector Should I Use for Application 'X'?

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 18:27:50 +0000

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

Tue, 10 Dec 2019 21:20:58 +0000

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

MIL-HDBK-141: Optical Design

And, courtesy of the good folks at Any2DJVU:

Lab Equipment List

Tue, 10 Dec 2019 21:11:52 +0000

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”.)