A high bit rate optical analog to digital converter

High speed optical computing and optical signal processing has produced considerable interest in the development of high resolution, high sampling rate optical analog to digital converters. High speed ADCs that utilize integrated optical waveguide technology play an important role in the development of these systems. Ramar Corp. proposes a novel optical A/D converter design which replaces the standard Mach-Zehnder interferometer design. This design is more efficient, smaller in size, achieve higher bandwidth and have better insertion loss than Mach-Zehnder design. Incorporating the Symmetric Number System technique with the proposed design, reduces the number of interferometers required, there by increasing the resolution to more than one bit per interferometer.