Photonic Analog-to-Digital Conversion Techniques
Summary
Photonic analog-to-digital converters employ light to sample and digitise high-frequency electrical signals, overcoming the speed and jitter limitations of purely electronic systems. Ultrastable optical pulse trains from mode-locked lasers serve as sampling clocks, while dispersion-engineered elements or multicore fibres introduce precise time delays for channel interleaving. Frequency-to-time mapping techniques convert spectral features into temporal replicas, enabling ultra-broadband acquisition. Photonic quantisers, whether all-optical or electro-optical, assign discrete levels to sampled amplitudes, and emerging data-driven algorithms correct system non-idealities to improve linearity and effective resolution. Recent progress has shifted platforms from bulky fibre-optic testbeds to chip-scale assemblies, integrating soliton microcombs and silicon photonic receivers to realise compact, robust, multichannel front-ends. Such systems combine sampling rates from tens of gigasamples to the terahertz regime with effective numbers of bits suitable for radar, high-speed communications, medical imaging and distributed sensing.
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Photonic Analog-to-Digital Conversion Techniques publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in photonic analog-to-digital conversion techniques across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Effective number of bits (ENOB): measure of converter resolution accounting for noise and distortion in the digitised signal.
Time interleaving: technique in which multiple sampling channels capture the input signal in a staggered fashion to increase the aggregate sampling rate.
Dispersion diversity: use of optical paths with different chromatic dispersion to introduce true-time delays for parallel sampling channels.
Kerr soliton microcomb: chip-scale frequency comb generated in nonlinear microresonators used as a multiwavelength optical source for sampling or mixing.
Photonic quantisation: conversion of sampled optical amplitudes into discrete digital levels using optical or electro-optical elements.
References
- Non-sliced optical arbitrary waveform measurement (OAWM) using soliton microcombs. Optica (2023).
- Photonic-Assisted Analog-to-Digital Conversion Based on a Dispersion-Diversity Multicore Fiber. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics (2023).
- Deep-learning-powered photonic analog-to-digital conversion. Light: Science & Applications (2019).
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