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.