A new proposal of spectral encoded photonic analog-to-digital converter

A novel scheme of spectral encoded photonic analog-to-digital converter is proposed. Cascaded lithium niobate Mach-Zehnder modulators are used to convert the amplitude of the electrical analog signal to the shift of the transmission characteristic, and a set of interleaving spectral filters perform as the optical comparators. Compared with usual spectral encoded photonic analog-to-digital converter, particular benefit of our proposed scheme is no requirement of nonlinear effects to realize spectral quantization and encoding.