Design on serial optical digital-to-analog converter and its experiment

Optical techniques have the potential to overcome limitations of electronic digital-to-analog conversion (DAC). A serial optical DAC (ODAC) utilizing the dispersion property of fiber-optic is proposed and demonstrated. The structure of the proposed DAC is designed based on the concerning of dispersive summing and electro-optic bit selection, which is easier to be realized compared with the conventional serial optical DAC. An implementation is experimentally demonstrated at operating rate of 12.5 Gb/s. Tunable fiber-optic delay line (TFDL)-based phase matching is investigated. The technical issues to reach a higher performance of the proposed DAC are discussed, the designed schematic structure in this paper could be easily modified for realizing higher speed and higher resolution.