Strip silicon waveguide for code synchronization in all-optical analog-to-digital conversion based on a lumped time-delay compensation scheme

An all-optical analog-to-digital converter (ADC) based on the nonlinear effect in a silicon waveguide is a promising candidate for overcoming the limitation of electronic devices and is suitable for photonic integration. In this paper, a lumped time-delay compensation scheme with 2-bit quantization resolution is proposed. A strip silicon waveguide is designed and used to compensate for the entire time-delays of the optical pulses after a soliton self-frequency shift (SSFS) module within a wavelength range of 1550 nm-1580 nm. A dispersion coefficient as high as -19800 ps/(km·nm) with ± 0.5 ps/(km·nm) variation is predicted for the strip waveguide. The simulation results show that the maximum supportable sampling rate (MSSR) is 50.45 GSa/s with full width at half maximum (FWHM) variation less than 2.52 ps, along with the 2-bit effective-number-of-bit and Gray code output.