Fiber optical communication systems have attained significant importance in space applications
e.g. Satellites, Space stations, etc. The systems have remarkably lightweight characteristics, less
frequency dependent loss, and provide high-speed data transmission in a power-efficient way. Satellites
and space stations are exposed to a higher level of radiation due to energetic particles in space.
Fiber optical links mainly consist of integrated semiconductor devices. When integrated circuits
are exposed to radiation such as in space applications, they are influenced by high-energy ionizing
particles. This radiation causes malfunctioning of electronic devices and reduces their life span.
It also generates transmission errors which are classified as single-event transients (SETs), single
event upsets, and single event latch-up, and also causes total ionization dose effects. This thesis proposes
a radiation tolerant (SET tolerant) optical receiver using triple modular redundancy (TMR) in
which a conventional receiver is split into three identical sub-receivers in parallel. Majority voting
is performed at the outputs after the received analog signal has been thresholded.
To investigate the effectiveness of the proposed design, a conventional optical receiver is taken
as a reference design, and its performance is compared with the proposed TMR-based radiation
tolerant optical receiver. The proposed receiver uses an impedance scaling technique so that its
overall power dissipation, gain, and bandwidth are the same as the reference design while providing
SET tolerance. The proposed receiver removes SET errors with the limitation that only one subreceiver
experiences a SET in a given unit interval. By applying the impedance scaling technique,
the proposed receiver is robust to SET errors with no increase in overall power dissipation but at the
sensitivity cost of 0.8 dB.