Photonic analog-to-digital converter using soliton self-frequency shift and interleaving spectral filters

We propose a novel ultrafast photonic analog-to-digital converter that uses the soliton self-frequency shift in an optical fiber as an optical power-to-frequency conversion mechanism and a set of interleaving spectral filters as the optical comparators. Our method does the entire signal processing in the optical domain and only requires binary receivers in the electronic domain. In contrast to the usual exponential scaling, the simultaneous binary search architecture that we proposed results in a "flash" analog-to-digital converter with a remarkable linear scaling between the number of comparators and the number of bits resolved.