Photonic ADC: overcoming the bottleneck of electronic jitter.
By A. Khilo, S. Spector, M. Grein, A. Nejadmalayeri, C. Holzwarth, M. Sander, M. Dahlem, M. Peng, M. Geis, N. DiLello and 17 more. Optics Express, 2012
431 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Accurate conversion of wideband multi-GHz analog signals into the digital domain has long been a target of analog-to-digital converter (ADC) developers, driven by applications in radar systems, software radio, medical imaging, and communication systems. Aperture jitter has been a major bottleneck on the way towards higher speeds and better accuracy. Photonic ADCs, which perform sampling using ultra-stable optical pulse trains generated by mode-locked lasers, have been investigated for many years as a promising approach to overcome the jitter problem and bring ADC performance to new levels. This work demonstrates that the photonic approach can deliver on its promise by digitizing a 41 GHz signal with 7.0 effective bits using a photonic ADC built from discrete components. This accuracy corresponds to a timing jitter of 15 fs - a 4-5 times improvement over the performance of the best electronic ADCs which exist today. On the way towards an integrated photonic ADC, a silicon photonic chip with core photonic components was fabricated and used to digitize a 10 GHz signal with 3.5 effective bits. In these experiments, two wavelength channels were implemented, providing the overall sampling rate of 2.1 GSa/s. To show that photonic ADCs with larger channel counts are possible, a dual 20-channel silicon filter bank has been demonstrated.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ec4560bc781944dc74723771d422f9a37241ad29
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Citations in the corpus
- Integrating photonics with silicon nanoelectronics for the next generation of systems on a chip (2018, background): “appearing in the process: (1) and (2), transistor and photonic isolation fabrication; (3) transistor 507 front-end fabrication up to source/drain implant, including gate definition; (4) deposition, anneal, 508 and polishing of photonic polysilicon film; (5) polysilicon full and partial etching for f”
- A monolithic integrated photonic microwave filter (2016, methodology): “t to a generic programmable architecture. IMWP ASPICs with certain complexity have been reported to date mainly in four material platforms: indium phosphide (InP) [12- 14], Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) [15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21], silicon nitride (Si3N4) [22, 23, 24, 25, 26] and chalcogenide glass [2”
- Advances in High-Speed DACs, ADCs, and DSP for Optical Coherent Transceivers (2014, background): “Red stars refer to photonic ADCs compiled by Khilo [38].”
- Microwave Photonic Radars (2020, background): “applications, such as low-noise microwave signal generation [166], [167], optical sampling and ADC [112], [168], [169], Fourier transform [170], [171], phase detection [172]–[174],”