High Voltage Pulse Driver

[kuhny1]

Quick, possibly stupid question.

I've been working on a LiDAR project and I need to either build or buy a driver capable of driving a LD with pulse widths near a few nS. I have found a driver that is capable of that however it has a drive voltage of 50-200V with a current range of 6-20A (I can post a link if requested, not sure if I was allowed to). I assume that LDs act differently at those short pulse times and so could high output LDs like the NUBM44 handle a 100V pulse for 2-3nS? I don't ever remember hearing of HV LDs but if they do exist that would be interesting to experiment with.

I guess the high voltage is needed to get the diode on as fast as possible. I will obviously test it with say an LED to see if it will pop one of those first before I instantly waste $100

Anyways, if anyone has any experience with high voltage, high frequency drivers and have some pointers, let me know!

 

[Cyparagon]

This isn't my forte, but an avalanche pulse generator comes to mind. https://www.codrey.com/electronic-circuits/avalanche-pulse-generator-an-introduction/

This might be a question for the EEVBlog forums instead.

 

[kuhny1]

This isn't my forte, but an avalanche pulse generator comes to mind. https://www.codrey.com/electronic-circuits/avalanche-pulse-generator-an-introduction/

This might be a question for the EEVBlog forums instead.

Thanks for the resource! I checked it out and it seems that they directly drive the LED without any current protection. So I assume that for LEDs this acceptable. 120V DC across any LED in CW will obviously kill it, so pulse length does seem to matter. I'll try to build one of these up today and see how quick it really is using a PMT.
Thanks!

 

[kuhny1]

Bit of an update for anyone interested in pulse driving laser diodes. I have managed to pulse a BDR-209 at 24 volts without any noticable damage. Pulse width is under 50nS (If I correctly understand how the output of a PMT behaves). The driver is rated for max pulse width of 5nS so maybe some stray capacitance/inductance somewhere.

As expected, the output pulse is extremely dim, so higher voltages are clearly needed. How high is the question.

I will try higher voltages, up to 60V, to see what level causes it to go LED. It may not at all, and if it doesn't than I'll put a 7W LD on the output. Will continue to update my findings as I test things out, currently waiting on a power supply. If or when the overall project is done, I'll post it in a different thread.