title: Photonic preprocessor for analog-to-digital-converter using a cavity-less pulse source.
abstract: A photonic preprocessor for analog to digital conversion is demonstrated and characterized using a cavity-less optical pulse source. The pulse source generates high fidelity pulses at 2 GHz repetition rate with temporal width of 3 ps. Chirped pulses are formed by cascaded amplitude and phase modulators, and subsequently compressed in dispersion compensating fiber. Sampling operation is performed with a dual-output Mach-Zehnder modulator, where the complimentary output enables a reduction of noise by 3 dB. Phase noise characterization shows that the phase noise of the generated pulses is fully dictated by the RF source. The high quality of the pulse source used in a sampling preprocessor experiment was verified by measuring 8 effective number of bits at 10 GHz and 7.0 effective number of bits at 40 GHz.
authors.affiliation: University of California San Diego, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093, USA. awiberg@ucsd.edu
authors.forename: Andreas O J
authors.initials: AO
authors.lastname: Wiberg
authors.forename: Lan
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Zhi
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Tong
authors.forename: Evgeny
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Myslivets
authors.forename: Vahid
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Ataie
authors.forename: Bill P-P
authors.initials: BP
authors.lastname: Kuo
authors.forename: Nikola
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Alic
authors.forename: Stojan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Radic