All-optical analog-to-digital conversion using optical interconnection for gray code coding

Abstract

The gray code based all-optical analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) using optical interconnection is described. Recent tremendous growths of optical communications and digital signal processing have encouraged the demand of high-speed and high-resolution ADC. To pursue a high-speed and high-resolution ADC, optical approaches have attracted much attention recently. ADC generally consists of three procedures: sampling, quantization and coding. Whereas the optical sampling techniques have been proposed and realized, the optical quantization and coding techniques have investigated depending on various applications. For the application to the binary detection of a high-speed digital signal, we previously proposed an all-optical ADC which consists of optical quantization using self-frequency shifting in a fiber and optical coding using optical interconnection for general binary code. In addition, since we can easily prepare optical interconnection patterns corresponding to the various codes, this technique can be used in any coding schemes. In this paper, we demonstrate the gray code based all-optical ADC to verify its scalability. Experimental results show that the 8-levels analog signals can be successfully converted into the bitwise allocated 3-bit gray code.