A burst mode, packet receiver with precision reset and automatic dark level compensation for optical bus communications

This paper describes a burst mode amplifier for packet mode, optical bus applications in the range of 1 Mb/s to 50 Mb/s. The circuit establishes an instantaneous logic threshold at the beginning of an optical data burst, handling photo-data packets differing by much as 50:1 in amplitude and separated by <145 ns, and with background light levels up to 100 times larger than the data signal.