Highly parallel pulsed optoelectronic analog-digital converter

We characterize the performance of a highly parallel pulsed optoelectronic analog to digital converter. The system is based on a time-domain to wavelength-domain mapping, such that an input analog signal is parallelized using a wavelength-division-demultiplexed scheme. Each parallel wavelength channel is then digitized using conventional, slow electronic analog-digital converters. We use narrow-band signals up to 18 GHz and histogram testing to characterize the system. From the measurements, we deduce the effective number of bits of the system to be /spl sim/6 and /spl sim/5 bits for 4 and 36 giga-samples-per-second (GSPS) sampling rates, respectively.