Abstract
Time-stretch photonic analog-to-digital converter (ADC) technology is used
to make an optical front end that compresses radio-frequency (RF) bandwidth
before input to a digital oscilloscope. To operate a time-stretch ADC in a
continuous-time mode for bandwidth compression, the optical signal on which
the RF is modulated must be segmented and demultiplexed. We demonstrate both
spectral and temporal methods for overlapping the channels. Using the
temporal method, we obtain a compression ratio of 3 with four channels.
Mating this optical front end with a state-of-the-art four-channel digital
oscilloscope with an input bandwidth of 16 GHz and a sampling rate of 50
GS/s gives a digitizer with 150 GS/s and an input bandwidth of 48 GHz. We
digitize RF signals up to 45 GHz and obtain effective number of bits (ENOB) ${\sim} 2.8$ with single channels and ${\sim} 2.5$ with multiple channels, both measured over the 48-GHz
instantaneous bandwidth of our system.
© 2009 IEEE
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