Characterization of a hybrid photonic analog-digital converter based on WDM technique

Recently, we have proposed and initially demonstrated a novel hybrid photonic analog to digital converter (ADC) based on a WDM technique that combines the high-bandwidth optical front-end with parallel wavelength-multiplexed signal transmission followed by a high-resolution, low-cost electronic back-end digitization. Here, we experimentally characterize the potential performance of such a hybrid ADC for directly digitizing analog signals with frequencies as high as 18 GHz