InP-HBT optoelectronic integrated circuits for photonic analog-to-digital conversion

Recently, there has been great interest in the application of photonic sampling to help achieve analog-to-digital conversion (A/D) with high resolution at multi-GHz sampling rates (f/sub s/). Conceptually, the low-jitter picosecond pulses generated by a mode-locked laser are ideal vehicles that would enable one to accomplish impulse sampling of an analog signal. To this end we have developed a 4-bit 20 Gsample/s flash analog-to digital converter in InP HBT technology with monolithically integrated optical signal and optical clock receivers.