Nt1310 Unit 6 Lab Report

Chapter 7 is to discuss the actual implementation and issues found during the experiment. The number of issues that were found during the project will be discussed in this chapter. Types of issues that will be discussed, are component issues, integration issues and construction issues. A cost summary of the components that were bought, will be shown in this chapter.
7.2 COMPONENT AND INTEGRATION IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES
In this section, the following issues that were found, when integrating the components that were used complete the experiments. These were discussed in chapter 5. The three circuits were built from existing configurations. The circuits that were built upon the chosen configuration were the following: an analog laser driver circuit,

Normally, if one would need to buy a laser diode and photodiode of a specific wavelength (1550nm or 1310nm), then it had to be bought internationally. This would have taken a long time to get. There were limited amount of laser diodes and photodiodes found in the lab, as some of these laser diodes and photodiodes cost around R2000.00 each. These components are very sensitive to electrostatic shock. By taking the cost into consideration, the laser diodes and photodiodes should be used with care. ESD wrist bands are really important, when conducting the experiment as a safety precaution. Absolute maximum rating for each device needs to be checked too from the datasheet. In order to test whether the laser diode is blown, one would need to connect it to a power meter and see whether the laser diode is producing the required power as the one increases the current. To check if the photodiode is damaged, the output voltage can be checked, to see if the photodiode is able to detect the light from the optical fibre. If the output voltage is not providing the necessary intensity on the oscilloscope, then it means that the photodiode is

Some of the Low noise amplifiers, such as the OP37GPZ and the TL071CN need to be tested before it is put into the circuit. Sometimes, there are short circuits between pins and if put in the circuit, one will see that the operational amplifier drawing current from the power supply. To avoid such problems, a multi-meter can be used to test whether each pin has continuity or not. If it has continuity, then the operational amplifier is damaged. It was found out that during the implementation of the experiment, the OP37GZ had a short circuit on two of the pins. This was a manufacturing fault on the component. However, a new OP37GZ amplifier was replaced and