Noise Characterization for Time Interleaved Photonic Analog to Digital Converters

We build noise models for analyzing the effect of four main noise terms consisting of the amplitude fluctuation of optical sampling pulse trains, timing jitter of optical sampling pulse trains, quantization and aperture jitter noise of electrical analog to digital converters, and noise in photodiodes on time interleaved photonic analog to digital converters. The analyses indicate that the random processes in the optical sampling pulse train and aperture of electrical analog to digital converters have significant effect on both the unmodulated and modulated components in the sampling results. Both quantization noise of electrical analog to digital converters and noise in photodiodes are unrelated to the optical sampling and can be considered as additive noises. Furthermore, we analyzed digital frequency spectra of different noises after time interleaving. To validate the theoretical model, we conduct the corresponding experiments, indicating the experimental results being consistent with the proposed noise models.