The Boeing Company

Michael C Hamilton

Axel Scherer

Harold E Hager

William P Krug

John A Bell

Harold Hager

The present invention provides a mixed analog and digital chip-scale reconfigurable WDM network. The network suitably includes a router that enables rapidly configurable wavelength selective routers of fiber optic data. The router suitably incorporates photonic wavelength selective optical add/drop filters and multiplexers.

WDM router

Mixed analog and digital chip-scale reconfigurable WDM network

An electro-optical analog-to-digital converter having an enhanced effective sample rate. Several embodiments of the electro-optical analog-to-digital converter (10, 100, 150, and 200) are described, each involving either space-division demultiplexing, time-division demultiplexing, or wavelength-division demultiplexing to increase the effective sample rate at which an analog signal provided by a source (36) can be converted to a digital signal using electrical analog-to-digital converters (66). A plurality of light pulses having a constant amplitude are modulated in response to the analog signal and demultiplexed using one of the three different techniques, so that the analog signal is sampled at successive points in time, varying the intensity of light pulses passing through each modulator channel (32, 104). In the space-division demultiplexing approach, light pulses produced by a mode-locked diode laser (12) are split into a plurality of channels and delayed by different time intervals so that the replicated pulses are spaced apart in time prior to being modulated by passage through a modulator array (32). The demultiplexed and modulated light pulses are input to a plurality of photodetectors (56) amplified by a plurality of amplifiers (60 ), and input to a plurality of electrical analog-to-digital converters (64). In the time-division multiplexing approach, either discrete optical switches (108) or an optical switch array (158) is used to transmit successive modulated light pulses into selected photodetectors for conversion to an electrical signal that is input to the analog-to-digital converters. The wavelength-division multiplexing approach uses a plurality of mode-locked diode lasers (210), each having a different characteristic wavelength. Pulses output from the mode-locked diode lasers are generated at different times and provided to a wavelength-division multiplexer (214) where they are combined and input to the modulator. A wavelength-division demultiplexer (220) separates the different wavelength pulses for input to selected photodetectors. For all the embodiments, the effective sample rate corresponds to the number of channels multiplied by the rate at which pulses are produced by the mode-locked laser diodes.

Electro-optical analog-to-digital converter and method for digitizing an

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Sammamish, WA, United States of America

Michael C Hamilton