High-speed opto-electronic transient waveform digitiser

摘要

Current military applications require data to be digitised at rates exceeding 10 Gsa/s with 8-bit resolution or more. This is far in excess of the performance of current commercial monolithic electronic ADCs. In fact, the ADC is often a limiting factor in the overall system performance. This paper describes a transient waveform digitiser that uses an optical technique to convert a single(electrical) signal into a series of time-delayed copies. Traditional repetitive sampling techniques are then used to achieve a high overall sampling rate. Results are presented for a prototype digitiser operating at 16 Gsa/s with 8-bit resolution.