Designing an Integrated All-Optical Analog to Digital Converter

We present the procedure for designing a high speed and low power all-optical analog to digital converter (AO-ADC), by integrating InGaAsP semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) with InP based photonic crystal (PhC) drop filters. The self-phase modulation in the SOA can shift the frequency of the Gaussian input pulse. The two output PhC based drop filters are designed to appropriately code the frequency-shifted analog signals by the SOA, converting them to four desired digital output levels. Our numerical results show that in an appropriately designed AO-ADC, the center wavelength (1572 nm) of an amplitude modulated Gaussian pulse of 1.8 ps width and 1.56 pJ energy can be shifted by 6.7 nm, by the SOA, and then be quantized and coded to four digital levels (00, 01, 10, and 11). The two point-defect PhC drop filters, compensating the effect of the frequency shift by SOA, minimize the AO-ADC integral and differential nonlinearity errors.