>we had about an inch of separation between our laser diodes and our photodiodes
Why can't you place them further away from each other using an additional optical system (i.e. a mirror) and adjusting for the additional distance in software?
You can, but customers like compact self-contained units. All trade offs.
Edit: There's basically three approaches to this problem that I'm aware of. Number one is to push the cross-talk below the noise floor -- your suggestion helps with this. Number two is to do noise cancellation by measuring your cross-talk and deleting it from the signal. Number three is to make the cross-talk signal distinct from a real reflection (e.g. by modulating the pulses so that there's low correlation between an in-flight pulse and a being-fired pulse). In practice, all three work nicely together; getting the cross-talk noise below saturation allows cancellation to leave the signal in place, and reduced correlation means that the imperfections of the cancellation still get cleaned up later in the pipeline.
You can, but customers like compact self-contained units. All trade offs.
Edit: There's basically three approaches to this problem that I'm aware of. Number one is to push the cross-talk below the noise floor -- your suggestion helps with this. Number two is to do noise cancellation by measuring your cross-talk and deleting it from the signal. Number three is to make the cross-talk signal distinct from a real reflection (e.g. by modulating the pulses so that there's low correlation between an in-flight pulse and a being-fired pulse). In practice, all three work nicely together; getting the cross-talk noise below saturation allows cancellation to leave the signal in place, and reduced correlation means that the imperfections of the cancellation still get cleaned up later in the pipeline.