GigOptix 100G MZ modulator aids 110-GHz time stretched ADC development

Aug. 11, 2009
AUGUST 10, 2009 -- GigOptix Inc. says its collaborative work with Prof. Bahram Jalali's engineering group at UCLA on using the company's LX8900 in a novel 110-GHz time stretched analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) application has succeeded.

AUGUST 10, 2009 -- GigOptix Inc. says its collaborative work with Prof. Bahram Jalali's engineering group at UCLA on using the company's LX8900 in a novel 110-GHz time stretched analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) application has succeeded.

The work addresses ultra-wide-band ADC in the context of digital signal processing (DSP) in communication, instrumentation, and radar systems. In broadband systems, the application of DSP is hindered by difficulty in capturing wide-band signals. The standard approach to deal with this problem is to employ parallelism through the use of the time-interleaved ADC architecture. Here, the signal is captured by a parallel array of slow digitizers. This architecture suffers from mismatches between digitizers that limit the dynamic range and therefore limits the resolution of such sample-interleaved ADC systems.

A new ADC architecture called time-stretched ADC is designed to overcome these issues using high-speed broadband Mach-Zehnder modulators. Here, the analog signal is slowed down prior to sampling and quantization by an electronic digitizer in the optical domain using certain nonlinearities in the optical fiber. This technique has applications in ultra high frequency communication, instrumentation, and radar systems.

"GigOptix's unique EO [electro-optical] polymer modulator technology is enabling a new branch of application in ultra high speed RF photonics," commented UCLA Researcher Ali Motafakker. "Ultra-wide-band ADC is a very challenging problem and our team is very excited about the performance of the LX8900 device and its potential to solve issues in this field. We are looking forward to continuing to drive this technology forward."

"We are very happy to see these excellent results coming back so quickly from our collaboration with UCLA," stated Andrea Betti-Berutto, CTO of GigOptix. "This is a significant moment for GigOptix in that it not only verifies our vision of combining our broadband EO polymer modulator technology with our broadband RF expertise and but also confirms our strategy of collaborating with leading research groups to define new applications for our technologies."

LX8900 samples are available immediately.

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