All optical 2-bit analog to digital converter using photonic crystal based cavities

A novel design for realizing all optical analog to digital converter will be proposed in this paper. The proposed structure consists of two main parts; a nonlinear 3-channel demultiplexer, followed by an optical coder. The nonlinear demultiplexer will be used to quantize the input analog signal according to its optical intensity and the coder will convert the quantized levels into 2-bit binary codes. The nonlinear demultiplexer will be realized using three nonlinear resonant cavities. At appropriate values of input signal optical intensity one of the cavities can drop the optical beam to its corresponding output port. The proposed structure is capable of supporting maximum sampling rate up to 52 GS/s and total footprint of the structure is about 924 mu m(2).