Computer Sciences and Information Technology
Title : | Design and development of next-generation Photonic Analog-to-Digital converters (NG-PADC) |
Area of research : | Computer Sciences and Information Technology, Engineering Sciences |
Focus area : | Photonic Analog-to-Digital Converters |
Principal Investigator : | Dr Deepa Venkitesh, Professor, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras |
Timeline Start Year : | 2019 |
Contact info : | sbalaji@iitm.ac.in ; deepav@iitm.ac.in |
Details
Executive Summary : | Timing jitter achievable in ultra-short optical pulses is significantly lower than the electronic counterparts. The conventional approach of parallelized electronic ADCs or down-conversion of frequencies offers limited scalability. The key highlight of the photonic approach is its ability to perform time-stretching in the optical domain; sampling and quantization can be carried out without compromising the signal to noise distortion ratio (SNDR) and the ENOB. The objectives of the project include indigenous development of the critical sub-system of PADC- a low timing jitter MLL and its integration with PADC. Suitable low bandwidth, high sampling ADCs will be used for interleaving and synchronization with the optical clock. A field trial of the system will be executed with industry support. IIT Madras has a strong experimental group in the area of fiber lasers and high-speed optical communication. Investigators have already developed fiber lasers of pulse widths of ps pulse widths. Active MLLs enable repetition rates in the order of several GHz. Issues related to environmental perturbations can be countered with regenerative mode-locking and the timing jitter will be minimized using a tunable delay line that is controlled through a feedback mechanism to offset any drift due to environmental fluctuations. IITM has also demonstrated digital communication at data rates of greater than 500 Gbps, dispersion measurement of both single-mode and few-mode fibers. They have also demonstrated chirp management using dispersion compensation through optical phase conjugation. Industry partner, Lightmotif, has developed multiple RF over Fiber (RoF) sub-systems covering VLF (few kHz) to Ku (up to 18GHz). These products are military standards qualified and used in multi-function Naval communication systems. Phase-matched DWDM RoF subsystems are also developed for Radar and ESM applications. The proposed approach would find applications in the accurate retrieval of instantaneous baseband data in high-frequency wireless and radar communication systems, in medical electronics (MRI). Such photonic-based ultrafast data acquisition schemes are the futuristic hardware accelerators for neuromorphic and multivariate computing systems, where traditional CPUs, GPUs, and neuromorphic electronics will not be powerful enough to train the neural networks of the near future. |
Co-PI: | Prof. Balaji Srinivasan, Dr Saurabh Saxena, Assistant Professor, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras |
Total Budget (INR): | 1,23,64,000 |
Publications : | 2 |
Patents : | 1 |
Organizations involved
