Single and multiwavelength modelocked semiconductor diode lasers for applications in photonic analog to digital converters

Summary form only given.Ultrahigh speed signal processing technologies are required for advanced radar applications that employ carrier frequencies in the multigigahertz regime. A key signal processing step for these advanced applications is providing for a fast, efficient, and cost effective methodology for realizing optical sampling and converting the sampled signals into a quantized and digitized data format. In this paper, we propose to utilize a hybrid approach to achieve this, i.e., to exploit the short sampling time provided by modelocked semiconductor diode lasers, and to also rely on the parallelism provided by a recently developed multiwavelength modelocked diode laser. In this approach, a low sample rate multiwavelength modelocked laser is driven by a low noise synthesizer. Typically the multiwavelength laser can be modelocked at 1 GHz, possessing at least 10 individual wavelengths.