Proposal for an all optical analog-to-digital converter based on modal birefringence in a polarization maintaining fiber

Abstract

Abstract. A photonic analog-to-digital converter (ADC) utilizing the modal birefringence of the polarization maintaining fiber (PMF) is proposed. In the PMF, sampling pulses with different wavelengths have different phase shifted transfer functions, which could be used for quantizing and encoding in a photonic ADC. A proof-of-concept experiment is performed and a 2.5 GHz sinusoidal electrical analog signal is quantized by using 16 different wavelengths. The experimental result with an effective number of bits of 4.5 is achieved.