Control and Signal Processing for Time-Stretch

Photonic Analog to Digital Converters

I. Introduction:

Microwave photonics is an emerging field that can effectively address several

challenges of electronic systems, for example in high frequency RADAR systems.
RADAR systems’ main function is surveillance. A single RADAR system has various
functionalities like detection, tracking etc. There are various limitations with the
present conventional RADAR systems like limited bandwidth, complexity, high
resource dependence, lack of stable RF generators, resolution of ADCs. Photonics
comes into this picture by providing the high time-bandwidth product and
compactness. Photonics can be used at almost every level in the RADAR system to
improve the efficiency. Photonic techniques can be used for RF signal generation,
stable distribution of RF signals to RADAR systems, sampling in ADCs, antenna
beam forming and RF signal filtering. If the RADAR signals are generated through
the photonics-based methods, bandwidths of them can be large, leading to a high
detection resolution of the system.
Problems Addressed
Since this is a very vast topic, the following are the specific issues that will be
attempted to solve in this project:
i) Bias Control for modulators:

The Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) has been widely used for broadband
photonic analog links and high-speed digital optical fiber communication systems
because it possesses large modulation bandwidth, low driving voltage, and low
chirp. It is used widely in radio over fiber systems for wireless and RADAR
applications. In an MZM, the input light is split into two paths, each of which is
modulated by an electrical signal. Then the two arms are combined to generate an
intensity-modulated light or a phase-modulated light at the output of the MZM.

The bias drift phenomena, caused by thermal effects will cause the transfer
function of the MZM to drift over time and change the optimum bias point setting.
The thermal bias drift phenomenon is mainly caused by the charge migration and
the build-up of pyroelectric charges in the substrate. It has been attempted to
propose techniques to minimize bias drift by introducing new device fabrication,
special design and packaging. Even though these approaches can attain
improvement in stability of bias drift, MZM is still required to have precise bias
control. Consequently, a bias control circuit has to be used to compensate for the
bias drift. For both optical frequency multiplication and optical subcarrier
modulation in photonic analog links, e.g., radio over fiber (RoF) systems, bias
control techniques need to be carefully investigated to ensure that the MZM is
operated consistently in its desired bias point, and hence higher nonlinearity for
 optical frequency multiplications and higher gain and linearity for RoF systems
can be realized.

ii) RF generation using Opto-electronic Oscillators

Figure 1 Basic operation of Optoelectronic Oscillator

Figure 1 shows the operation of the Opto-electronic oscillator. The Optoelectronic

oscillator starts with continuous wave laser is penetrating into the intensity
modulator. The output of optical intensity modulator is passed through a long
optical fiber delay line and into a photodiode. The improved electrical signal is
applied and approved through an electronic bandpass filter. To complete the Opto
electronic cavity the output of the filter is connected to the RF input of intensity
modulator. If the gain of the cavity is greater than the loss, then the optoelectronic
oscillator will start the oscillation. The electronic band pass filter selects the
frequency of the diminished the other free running modes of the cavity which is
below the threshold. This can be used to test the photonic ADCs also.

iii) Signal Processing for Time-stretched Photonic ADC

Digital signal processing (DSP) has taken modern communication to a whole new
level by enabling high performance and flexibility. For broad-band systems,
however, the application of DSP is hindered by difficulty in capturing the wide-
band signal. The real-time capture of ultrafast electrical signals is a difficult
problem that requires wide-band analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) The
performance of electronic ADCs is limited because of various reasons like jitter in
the sampling clock; settling time of the sample-and-hold circuit; speed of the
comparator (comparator ambiguity); mismatches in the transistor thresholds and
passive component values. A major factor limiting the progress towards higher
rates and resolutions is aperture jitter, i.e. inability of ADCs to sample at precisely
defined times
The solution to this problem is the Photonic ADC. The basic idea of a photonic
ADC is that sampling in optical domain to reduce the jitter by a high order of
magnitude and quantization in the electric domain. Wavelength demultiplexing is
used to separate the various frequencies in the optical modulated signal which are
then digitized through different channels and further time-stitched together.
Quantization happens in the electrical domain. An entirely new A/D architecture
is the so-called time-stretched ADC. Here, the analog signal is slowed down prior
to sampling and quantization by an electronic digitizer.
Wideband optical pulses propagate through a dispersive medium DM1 such as
dispersion-compensating fiber, which spreads the pulses to few ns and introduces
an optical chirp. These ns pulse propagate through an optical modulator, which
impresses a continuous RF signal on the ns pulse. The modulated optical pulses
propagate through DM2 with larger dispersion, such as a longer fiber, which
spreads the pulse and stretches the RF signal in time. The stretch ratio of this
system is given by (D2+D1)/D1 where D1 and D2 are the total dispersion of
DM1 and DM2. DM 2 mixes RF signals in time, but DM 2 does not mix
optical wavelengths in time. So, a wavelength division multiplexer can be
used to separate the channels as shown in Figure 2. The wavelength bands of
the WDM are chosen so that the optical signals at the PDs are continuous in
time and consist of interleaved time blocks of the RF signal [Valley, 2007]

Figure 2: Time-stretch Photonic ADC (Valley, 2007)