Sparse radio frequency signal sampling based on 1-bit quantized photonic compressive sensing system

A 1-bit quantized photonic compressive sensing (PCS) system is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The 1-bit quantization is realized with a comparator. Compared with the commonly used high-precision quantizer, the 1-bit quantizer can effectively solve the problems associated with low quantization rate, high power consumption, and storage pressure when quantizing a high-frequency signal. A proof-of-concept experiment is constructed. A two-tone signal in the range of 0~1 GHz is successfully captured and reconstructed with the proposed system under a sampling rate of 250 MSa/s.