Photonic analog-to-digital converter using soliton self-frequency shift and interleaving spectral filters.

We propose a novel ultrafast photonic analog-to-digital converter that uses the soliton self-frequency shift in an optical fiber as an optical power-to-frequency conversion mechanism and a set of interleaving spectral filters as the optical comparators. Our method does all the signal processing in the optical domain and requires binary receivers in only the electronic domain. In contrast to the usual exponential scaling, the simultaneous binary search architecture that we propose results in a flash analog-to-digital converter with remarkable linear scaling between the number of comparators and the number of bits resolved.