Photonic sampled and electronically quantized analogue to digital conversion in access networks

Data conversion is the bottleneck of today's communications to get the maximum efficiency with the least possible costs. Since most of the signals are naturally continuous in both time and amplitude, the Analogue to Digital (A/D) interface should be considered to be a challenging section of the processing system. Furthermore, Photonic Analogue to Digital Converter (PADC) is a critical component to take advantages of digital signal on optically assisted access networks - which is being grown up on new age communications-like Radio over Fibre (RoF). This paper proposed 3-bit photonic sampled and electronically quantized ADC (PSEQ-ADC) with 15 Gb/s data rate and 200 picoseconds conversion rate. The simulation results show that the maximum ENOB value of 2.52 was achieved at the sampling frequency of 17 GHz.