Optical A/D converter using SEEDs: Architecture and implementation

The use of high repetition rate, low timing jitter SC laser pulse trains there might facilitate the fabrication of integrated optical analog to digital converters operating with high bandwidths at high speed. The error diffusion oversampling architecture has been suggested for use in an analog to digital conversion scheme using self electro optic effect devices (SEEDs). We use a numerical model to predict the performance of an A/D converter based on the first order error diffusion architecture (and various modifications to this architecture) using realistic parameters for the behaviour of elements such as the subtraction nodes, quantiser and high repetition rate laser clock pulse train.