An Innovative Optical Sampling ADC Approach For Direct digitisation of Modulated RF signals in Radar applications

The utilization of complex advanced signal processing in radar has encouraged a passion to change analog signals into digitized format and do all consequent processing carefully. Optical strategies are being connected to simple ADC to accomplish the wide data transmission capability. This method can be used to sample high RF frequency input signal using optical sampling signals of width of picoseconds. Analog to Digital (AD) conversion is a fundamental operation of information technologies to digitize the input signal with required Signal bandwidth, resolution and effective number of bits. To achieve large conversion characteristics with higher speed, photonic ADCs are more preferable than electronic ADCs due to its limitations. This paper discusses the realization of a photonic ADC using an optical sampling method. It also brings out some of the results obtained during the modelling as well as the experimental analysis of this prescribed photonic ADC. The paper also signifies the requirement of MicroWavePhotonics (MWP) based solutions in radar systems to enhance the performance with less hardware solutions.