Photonic Crystal Based Optical Analog-to-Digital Converter

As the required data bandwidth and processing speed for commercial or military applications grows rapidly, the required performance of analog-to-digital conversion also expands. Regardless of the speed of signal processing hardware or software, the basic solution always gravitates toward an ultimate ADC design. Analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are widely viewed as a bottleneck in high-performance communication and radar systems. Although the speed of signal processing has improved tremendously in the past decade or so, improvements in ADC speed and resolution have been much slower. The growing gap between processing speed and ADC speed underscores the need for brand new concepts and revolutionary improvements in ADC performance. In the current Phase I STTR effort, we propose a novel photonic ADC method that does all the signal processing in the optical domain and requires binary receivers in only the electronic domain. Our design in large part parallels that of a dense wavelength-division multiplexing transmission system and takes advantage of the recent advances in chip-scale photonic crystal based optical interconnects and processing units, generating synergies between the two fields