Design of an ultra high-speed all-optical analog-to-digital converter

Abstract

An all-optical analog-to-digital converter capable of sampling at 50GS/s is described. The ADC works in the spectral domain as opposed to the other techniques of all-optical or hybrid methods. The RF signal is sampled by electro-optically steerable gratings and quantized by a set of detectors with scalable apertures. Low timing jitter is provided by a mode-locked laser.