Optically Enabled ADCs and Application to Optical Communications

Abstract

Electrical-optical signal processing has been shown to be a promising path to overcome the limitations of state-of-theart all-electrical data converters. In addition to ultra-broadband signal processing, it allows leveraging ultra-low jitter mode-locked lasers and thus increasing the aperture jitter limited effective number of bits at high analog signal frequencies. In this paper, we review our recent progress towards optically enabled time-and frequency-interleaved analog-to-digital converters, as well as their monolithic integration in electronic-photonic integrated circuits. For signal frequencies up to 65 GHz, an optoelectronic track-andhold amplifier based on the source-emitter-follower architecture is shown as a power efficient approach in optically enabled BiCMOS technology. At higher signal frequencies, integrated photonic filters enable signal slicing in the frequency domain and further scaling of the conversion bandwidth, with the reconstruction of a 140 GHz optical signal being shown. We further show how such optically enabled data converter architectures can be applied to a nonlinear Fourier transform based integrated transceiver in particular and discuss their applicability to broadband optical links in general.

Delocalized photonic deep learning on the internet’s edge

“…Emerging photonic technologies, such as low-power static phase shifters ( 26 – 28 ) and high-speed phase shifters ( 29 – 32 ), can reduce receiver electrical energy consumption to ≈10 aJ per MAC. This energy can be further decreased by making use of the tight integration of transistors and photonics in silicon using technologies such as receiverless detectors ( 10 ), photonic DACs ( 33 ), and photonic ADCs ( 34 ). Detectors such as avalanche detectors could be incorporated with a time integrator to provide a benefit to the optical sensitivity of the receiver, but at the cost of added electrical power consumption (supplementary text section 21).…”

Silicon Photonic Integrated Circuits for Soliton Based Long Haul Optical Communication

“…This configuration allows single channel reception with the maximum bit and sampling resolution afforded by the oscilloscope. While all the experiments reported in this paper have been done with single-channel reception, we have also made first experiments with joint multi-channel reception via a wideband receiver, with results described in [35].…”

Non-Sliced Optical Arbitrary Waveform Measurement (OAWM) Using a Silicon Photonic Receiver Chip

“…Note, however, that the optical phase noise of the LO comb will limit the maximum recording length in some applications. Phase-noise induced distortions may, e.g., be avoided by homodyne detection schemes as used in photonic-electronic ADC schemes [10][11][12][13], or by phase recovery algorithms in case of data signals.…”

“…( 22) for the combined LO and ADC jitter observed for the broadband test signal defined in Eq. (11). As there are two independent contributions, the ADC jitter (ADC) j τ and LO-comb jitter (LO) j τ , we first derive separate expressions for the individual noise-to-signal ratios (NSR), and add them in a second step according to Eq.…”

“…ptical arbitrary waveform measurement (OAWM) based on frequency combs gives access to the full-field information of broadband optical waveforms [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. Applications range from reception of high-speed communication signals [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] and elastic optical networking [4] This work was supported by the ERC Consolidator Grant TeraSHAPE (# 773248), by the EU H2020 project TeraSlice (# 863322), by the DFG projects PACE (# 403188360) and GOSPEL (# 403187440) within the Priority Programme SPP 2111 "Electronic-Photonic Integrated Systems for Ultrafast Signal Processing" and via the DFG Collaborative Research Center (CRC) HyPERION (SFB 1527), by the BMBF project Open6GHub (# 16KISK010), by the EU H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network MICROCOMB (# 812818), by the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach to ultra-broadband photonic-electronic analog-to-digital conversion [10][11][12][13] and investigation of ultra-short events in science and technology [1]. Previous demonstrations of combbased OAWM have relied on spectrally sliced reception, where the broadband optical input signal is first decomposed into a multitude of narrowband spectral slices by appropriate optical filters.…”