Implementation of Ultra-wideband Photonic Analog-to-Digital Conversion System

Implementation of a 16-giga-samples-per-second (GSPS) photonic analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) system for ultra-wideband radar receiver is reported in this paper. An actively mode-locked fiber laser with 4GHz repetition rate was used as the optical source in our photonic ADC system. The 16GSPS photonic ADC was realized by utilizing a simplified architecture with an array of four optical modulators. The system works at 10~14GHz and the maximum instantaneous bandwidth is 4GHz. The effective number of bits (ENOB) can reach 4.7bits after digitization and data interleaving.