Novel Bipolar Photonic Digital-to-Analog Conversion Employing Differential Phase Shift Keying Modulation and Balanced Detection

A novel weighed and summing bipolar photonic digital-to-analog converter (BPDAC) scheme employing optical differential phase shift keying modulation and balanced detection is proposed and demonstrated in a proof-of-principle experiment of three-bit resolution and 2.5-GS/s conversion rate. Compared with the existing unipolar PDAC schemes, this BPDAC has a greater dynamic range and a larger noise margin. Compared with our previously proposed BPDAC based on optical differential quadrature phase shift keying modulation, it is much more robust to the phase detuning, and the tolerable range is greatly expanded from ±1° to ±18°.