Adopting Electroabsorption Modulator for the WLAN 802.11a Radio over Fibre System

This paper presents the evaluation of radio over fibre (ROF) capability with electroabsorption modulator (EAM) as a downlink photodetector (PD) and uplink radio frequency (RF) modulator. The results show that the EAM device has potential to be adopted as the transceiver at the remote antenna unit (RAU) for the system. The 130m ROF system with biased EAM is capable to obtain a symmetrical WLAN 802.11a data rate of 18Mbps with laser diode output power of 8.7dBm.