Experimental Demonstration of a Photonic Analog-to-Digital Converter Architecture With Pseudorandom Sampling

A photonic analog-to-digital converter architecture is demonstrated that uses nonuniform, sub-Nyquist sampling combined with digital signal processing algorithms to unambiguously identify microwave signals of interest. X -band (8-12 GHz) operation is demonstrated with two-tone signals of separation extending to >2 GHz that were directly sampled and digitized at a mean rate of 995.3 MHz resulting in alias-free power spectra.