Demonstration of optical sample parallelisation for high-speed photonic assisted ADCs

An experimental demonstration of an optical parallelisation scheme for a high-sampling-rate photonic-assisted analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) is presented. By exploiting four-wave mixing in high nonlinear fibre, a tenfold parallelisation of a 9.952GS/s signal is realised with signal-to-noise ratio ranging from 24.94 to 27.53 dB, corresponding to effective number of bits (ENOB) from 3.86 to 4.26 bits. Capability for ENOB of 6 bits is also permitted, and potentials for parallelisation of larger scale are also discussed.