10-GS/s 5-bit Real-Time Optical Quantization for Photonic Analog-to-Digital Conversion

We report the experimental demonstration of a 10-GS/s 5-bit real-time optical quantization using the soliton self-frequency shift (SSFS) and multistage spectral compression. We prove the feature of sampling rate transparency at 10 GS/s by transmitting 10-Gb/s multi-intensity level quasi analog signals through our 5-bit optical quantizer. Furthermore, to confirm the performance of our quantizer, we measure the bit-error-rate and calculate the effective number of bits, the integral nonlinearity error, and the differential nonlinearity error.