Abstract: An improved PIN photodiode provides enhanced linearity by confining the light absorption region of the diode wholly within the depletion region. The photodiode exhibits improved linearity over prior art designs because the thickness of the absorption region is no longer a function of changes in the size of the depletion region during device operation. Keeping the absorption region wholly within the depletion region ensures that the charge carriers generated by incident illumination will increase the conductivity of the semiconductor material.

Abstract: Simplified methods of searching a codebook table are provided. These methods perform a codebook search for a plurality of pulses, one pulse at a time, in order of increasing to decreasing pulse significance, wherein pulse significance is defined as the relative contribution a given pulse provides to minimizing the mean-squared error between the source signal and the quantized sequence of pulses.