18 wavelengths 83.9Gs/s optical sampling clock for photonic A/D converters

In this paper, a simple approach to generate the time-wavelength interleaved sampling clock for photonic A/D converters is proposed using commercially available mode-locked femtosecond fiber laser and optical wavelength/time division multiplexing (WDM/OTDM) techniques with low cost passive optical components. A time and wavelength mapping module is configured using specially designed wavelength division multiplexer and mechanical tunable fiber stretchers. OTDM modules with low optical insertion loss and flexibly configurable multiple factor are implemented with the fused-biconical optical fiber couplers. Experiment is carried out using 18 WDM channels and 128 times OTDM to demonstrate the generation of 83.9Gs/s time-wavelength interleaved sampling clock.