Electro-optical analog-to-digital converter based on LiNbO3 Mach-Zehnder modulators

We propose a novel scheme that can realize high-precision and high-speed electro-optical analog-to-digital converter (ADC). The scheme is based on the Taylor's structure. In contrast to the conventional Taylor's structure, where modulators are in parallel, we use cascaded modulators which can solve the low precision problem of the conventional Taylor's structure. We have analyzed the performance of the proposed ADC structure in theory, the theoretical analysis shows that the precision of our scheme could be 10-bits. The speed in operating of our scheme is related with the speed of modulator. In our scheme, the modulator is LiNbO3 Mach Zehnder interferometric modulator with a low half-wave voltage, which 40 GHz can be achieved.