A photonic analog-to-digital converter (ADC) scheme based on multi-wavelength sampling and balanced detection is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. In the approach, a power-weighted multi-wavelength pulsed source is employed to implement sampling, a dispersion element is used to realize temporal walk-off of multi-wavelength pulses, and a thresholding module is applied to implement serial thresholding. The principles of quantization and encoding are similar to that of an electronic flash ADC, but the serial implementation in the given approach avoids the use of large numbers of comparators. A proof-of-concept experiment with three wavelengths is successfully demonstrated. We also discuss the feasibility of the approach and the design of non-uniform quantization by properly setting the power ratio of the multi-wavelength pulses.

中文翻译：

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闪存模数转换器的光子串行实现

提出并通过实验证明了一种基于多波长采样和平衡检测的光子模数转换器方案。该方法采用功率加权的多波长脉冲源进行采样，使用色散元件实现多波长脉冲的时间离散，采用阈值模块实现串行阈值。量化和编码的原理与电子闪存ADC的原理相似，但是给定方法中的串行实现避免了使用大量的比较器。成功证明了三种波长的概念验证实验。通过适当设置多波长脉冲的功率比，我们还讨论了该方法的可行性和非均匀量化的设计。