High-Speed Arbitrary Waveform Generation Based on The Temporal Vernier Effect

High-speed arbitrary waveforms with a sampling rate over 100 GSa/s are of fundamental interest for various applications, such as spectroscopy, radar, optical communications, and biological imaging. In this paper, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel approach to the photonic generation of high-speed arbitrary waveforms based on the temporal Vernier effect with a simple and low-cost architecture involving a mode-locked laser (MLL) and a fiber loop. We show that the high sampling rate can be realized by matching two different temporal scales, i.e., the period of the optical pulse train from the MLL and the round-trip time of the fiber loop. The approach is evaluated experimentally. Two arbitrary waveforms with a widely tunable sampling rate from 5 to 250 GSa/s are generated. The fidelity of the generated waveforms is also evaluated by calculating the average root mean square error, which is as low as 0.0479.