A Photonic Analog-to-Digital Converter Based on an Unbalanced Mach-Zehnder Quantizer

A Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) based analog to digital converter (ADC) design is described. A single high speed unbalanced modulator is utilized as a quantizer. The signal to be digitized is applied to a single electrode. The rest of the system consists of commercially available, well developed wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) components. Analysis indicates that this system could provide 6 bits of resolution at 40 giga samples per second (GS/s) with moderate optical power.