Electro-optical switching based demultiplexing in high-speed photonic analog-to-digital converter based on actively mode-locked laser

We demonstrate an electro-optical switching based demultiplexing scheme for high-speed photonic analog-to-digital converter system. In a 20 GHz actively mode locked laser based photonic analog-to-digital converter system, a Mach-Zehnder modulator is used as the electro-optical switching to demultiplex the 20 GS/s sampled series into two channels at the speed of 10 GS/s, which are then digitized at 10 GS/s in each channel. After data reconstruction and mismatch compensation, the spectral analysis of the digitized results shows an effective number of bits of 7 bits with 11 GHz input and 6 bits with 31 GHz input.