One important device in these new architectures is analog to digital converter (ADC) and its equivalent digital to analog converter (DAC). These will be the in/out interface for the use of digital processing in order to provide flexible beam to beam connectivity and variable bandwidth allocation. For telecom payloads having a large number of feeds and thus a large number of converters the mass and consumption of the mixer stage has become significant. Moreover, the inclusion of ADCs in the payload presents new trade-offs in design (jitter, quantization noise, ambiguity). This paper deals with an alternative solution of these two main problems with the exploitation of photonic techniques. |
Pulsed laser operation
Analog electronics
Astronomical imaging
Signal processing
Fiber lasers
Quantization
Signal to noise ratio