TY - JOUR AU - Khilo, A. AU - Spector, S. J. AU - Grein, M. E. AU - Nejadmalayeri, A. H. AU - Holzwarth, C. W. AU - Sander, M. Y. AU - Dahlem, M. S. AU - Peng, M. Y. AU - Geis, M. W. AU - Dilello, N. A. AU - Yoon, J. U. AU - Motamedi, A. AU - Orcutt, J. S. AU - Wang, J. P. AU - Sorace-Agaskar, C. M. AU - Popovi\'c, M. A. AU - Sun, J. AU - Zhou, G.-R. AU - Byun, H. AU - Chen, J. AU - Hoyt, J. L. AU - Smith, H. I. AU - Ram, R. J. AU - Perrott, M. AU - Lyszczarz, T. M. AU - Ippen, E. P. AU - Kärtner, F. X. AU - DESY TI - Photonic ADC: overcoming the bottleneck of electronic jitter JO - Optics express VL - 20 SN - 1094-4087 CY - Washington, DC PB - Soc. M1 - PHPPUBDB-25804 SP - 4454 PY - 2012 AB - 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. LB - PUB:(DE-HGF)16 C6 - pmid:22418205 UR - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:000301041900111 DO - DOI:10.1364/OE.20.004454 UR - https://bib-pubdb1.desy.de/record/144108 ER -