Photonic analog-to-digital conversion by distributed phase modulation

A photonic analog-to-digital converter with a binary optical output was constructed. The architecture scheme is a pipeline analog-to-digital converter, employing phase modulators and polarization-based optics. The result is a photonic analog signal processor that maps an input analog waveform into a binary output. The operational speed of the conversion is primarily limited by the maximum slew rate of the phase modulators.