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US 7,061,414 B2Granted
Optical digital-to-analog converter
AssigneeLucent Technologies Inc.
InventorsYoung-Kai Chen, Andreas Leven, Kun-Yii Tu
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Abstract
An optical digital-to-analog conversion is realized by employing either a continuous wave or pulsed laser optical signal. The laser optical signal is split into a plurality of mutually coherent optical beams, which are phase shift modulated by bits of a digital data sequence to be converted to an analog signal. The phase shift modulated optical beams are recombined to realize the desired digital-to-analog converted optical signal.
Claims20
A method of optically converting a digital signal to an analog signal, by employing a conversion module, comprising the steps of:
- receiving a predetermined optical signal;
- splitting the received optical signal into a plurality of mutually coherent optical beams;
- supplying said plurality of optical beams on a one-to-one basis to a corresponding plurality of optical phase shifters;
- supplying bits of a digital data sequence to said plurality of optical phase shifters for controlling the phase shift of the optical beams supplied to the individual ones of said plurality of phase shifters;
- and
- supplying said phase shifted optical beams to a combiner for recombining mutually coherent phase shifted optical beams, said combined mutually coherent phase shifted optical beams representing an optically converted digital-to-analog optical signal.
3 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.