Design of an efficient optical analog-to-digital converter using silicon waveguide based all-optical synchronous up counter

This paper defines a new design, simulation and analysis of all-optical analog-to-digital converters (ADC) based on silicon waveguide based all-optical synchronous up counter. The proposed structure consists of a nonlinear magnitude comparator, synchronous up counter and an optical digital to analog converter (DAC). Every proposed counter type ADC module is modelled using silicon optical micro-ring resonator (OMRR) as its core element. The magnitude comparator compares the analog signal to be digitized with the DAC output to generate 4-bit binary codes using a synchronous up counter depending on the evaluation states of the comparator. The digital optical output is detected at the output port of the synchronous up counter circuit numerical simulations authorizing the results with the theoretical results. In addition, the possible configurations of OMRR radius and detuning are specified by analyzing the system performance in terms of the amplitude deviation measure. Furthermore, several performance parameters, including extinction ratio (ER) and on-off ratio, are computed from the simulation outputs attained on MATLAB to evaluate the circuits' accurateness and practicability.