Broadband analog to digital conversion with spatial-spectral holography

A new approach to broadband photonic-assisted analog-to-digital converter (ADC) technology is proposed and analyzed. The core of the device is a spatial spectral holographic (SSH) material, which can directly record the signals of interest in the frequency domain. An SSH-ADC acts as a frequency-domain stretch processor, which leverages the high performance of conventional ADCs by converting high bandwidth input signals to low bandwidth output signals without loss of information. Analysis of a 10 GHz bandwidth SSH-ADC predicts that 10-bit performance can be achieved with currently available materials and components. SSH-ADC technology is scalable to bandwidths over 100 GHz with recently developed SSH materials. While the SSH-ADC is a transient digitizer, the spatial parallelism of SSH materials can be utilized to enable continuous digitization. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.