Six-bit all-optical quantization using photonic crystal fiber with soliton self-frequency shift and pre-chirp spectral compression techniques

In this paper, we propose an optical quantization scheme for all-optical analog-to-digital conversion that facilitates photonics integration. A segment of 10-m photonic crystal fiber with a high nonlinear coefficient of 62.8 W^-1/km is utilized to realize large scale soliton self-frequency shift relevant to the power of the sampled optical signal. Furthermore, a 100-m dispersion-increasing fiber is used as the spectral compression module for further resolution enhancement. Simulation results show that 317-nm maximum wavelength shift is realized with 1550-nm initial wavelength and 6-bit quantization resolution is obtained with a subsequent spectral compression process.