Compensation of multi-channel mismatches in high-speed high-resolution photonic analog-to-digital converter

We demonstrate a method to compensate multi-channel mismatches that intrinsically exist in a photonic analog-to-digital converter (ADC) system. This system, nominated time-wavelength interleaved photonic ADC (TWI-PADC), is time-interleaved via wavelength demultiplexing/multiplexing before photonic sampling, wavelength demultiplexing channelization, and electronic quantization. Mismatches among multiple channels are estimated in frequency domain and hardware adjustment are used to approach the device-limited accuracy. A multi-channel mismatch compensation algorithm, inspired from the time-interleaved electronic ADC, is developed to effectively improve the performance of TWI-PADC. In the experiment, we configure out a 4-channel TWI-PADC system with 40 GS/s sampling rate based on a 10-GHz actively mode-locked fiber laser. After multi-channel mismatch compensation, the effective number of bit (ENOB) of the 40-GS/s TWI-PADC system is enhanced from ~6 bits to >8.5 bits when the RF frequency is within 0.1-3.1 GHz and from ~6 bits to >7.5 bits within 3.1-12.1 GHz. The enhanced performance of the TWI-PADC system approaches the limitation determined by the timing jitter and noise.