Photonic analog-to-digital conversion by distributed phase modulation

A photonic analog-to-digital converter with a binary optical output was con structed. The architecture scheme is a pipeline analog-to-digital converter , employing phase modulators and polarization-based optics. The result is a photonic analog signal processor that maps an input analog waveform into a binary output, The operational speed of the conversion is primarily limite d by the maximum slew rate of the phase modulators.