A novel time and wavelength interleaved optical pulsed signal for a high resolution photonic analogue to digital converter

This paper presents a parallel architecture for a photonic Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) in a direct conversion receiver. A novel technique for the generation of time and wavelength interleaved laser source having a broad spectrum and a repetition rate of 8 GHz is proposed for the sampling of the photonic ADC. The quantization is realized in electrical domain by employing four state of the art ADCs , each having a sampling rate of 2 GHz and a resolution of 10 bit. We investigate the performance of our novel architecture by computing the Signal to Noise Ratio and comparing it with the conventional electronic ADC. Additionally we have also observed the effect of laser jitter on the sensitivity of a direct conversion receiver.