Photonic A/D converter using parallel synchronous quantization of optical signals

摘要

An N-bit analog to digital converter for converting optical signals into digital form is disclosed. The converter comprises N optical signal channels, one channel for each significant bit of the N-bit digital representation of the optical signal. Each optical channel comprises optical waveguides and photodetectors for converting the optical signal into electronic signals. The sensitivity of the photodetectors in each channel varies from most significant to least significant bit in the digital conversion. The electronic signals drive high-speed switching devices, each of which is set to a different threshold depending on which bit of the digital conversion the switch delivers. There are N switching devices directly driven by the N photodetector channels yielding N digital bits representing the magnitude of the optical input signal.