A NOVEL ANALOG-TO-DIGITAL CONVERSION ARCHITECTURE USING ELECTRON WAVE-GUIDES

We have demonstrated a novel analog-to-digital (A/D) conversion archit ecture based on the quantized conductance of electron waveguides. In o ur scheme, a dual electron waveguide (DWG) device implements a binary quantizer and encoder for one significant bit of resolution. The condu ctance values of the on and off states in the binary code are 2e2/h an d zero, respectively. By cascading multiple DWG devices, higher order significant bits can be attained. In this paper, we demonstrate the fi rst significant bit and the second significant bit of our analog-to-di gital conversion architecture using a DWG device fabricated in an AlGa As/GaAs modulation-doped heterostructure.