Toward a high-speed arbitrary waveform generation by a novel photonic processing structure

A new photonics-based method for high-speed arbitrary waveform generation is presented. It is based on generating high-speed short optical pulse samples and a grating and delay structure for amplitude weighting and time delaying the optical samples. In order to increase the number of samples, a novel delay-attenuation-coupling processing method is presented for realizing high resolution in waveform generation. Results are given for sawtooth waveform generation with fast fall time of 10% of period and waveform linearity deviation of 1%, demonstrating the high resolution and wide-band capabilities of this technique.