Time-warp correction and calibration in photonic time-stretch analog-to-digital converter

Abstract

We show how time warps caused by nonuniform wavelength-to-time mapping in the photonic time-stretch analog-to-digital converter (ADC) can be digitally measured and removed. This is combined with digital correction of wavelength-dependent Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) bias offset to attain a 10 GHz bandwidth digitizer with >7 effective bits of resolution and 52 dB spur-free dynamic range. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest resolution ADC in 10 GHz bandwidth range, with at least 1 order of magnitude higher signal-to-noise ratio than ever achieved. We also demonstrate concatenation of 30 wavelength interleaved time segments with high fidelity on the path to achieving continuous time operation.