US Patent 8953950 Ultra-high-speed photonic-enabled ADC based on multi-phase interferometry

A ultra high speed photonic Analog to Digital Converted (ADC) for sampling and quantizing an electrical voltage signal, internally enabled by photonics uses coherent optical detection architectures for photonic quantization. Coherent light is phase modulated by the test signal. Using an interferometer, or an array of interferometers the phase of modulated light is compared with a reference light. Flash ADC, successive approximation ADC and delta-sigma ADC configurations are presented.