A Binary-Weighted Photonic Digital-to-Analogue Converter

Abstract

In fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks the available bandwidth and the range of carrier frequencies will be significantly larger than in current mobile networks. To cope with the consequent increase in traffic 5G networks will be Digital Radio over Fibre (DRoF) networks for deploying cloud radio access networks (CRAN). As conventional electronic data converters in DRoF networks suffer from jitter at very high giga sampling rates while photonic data converters have better performance, photonic data converters are considered a fundamental building block of a DRoF system for 5G. All Photonic Digital Radio over Fibre (AP-DRoF) is a suitable candidate for carrying future 5G data traffic from a central station for delivery to remote pico-cells. In this paper an 8-Bit binary-weighted Photonic Digital to Analogue Converter (PDAC) for AP-DRoF is proposed for the conversion of an optical bit stream generated by a Photonic Analogue-to-Digital Converter (PADC) into optical analogue signal for delivery to the photo diode of a remote station’s photonic antenna. The potential performance of the proposed PDAC is investigated at a sampling rate of 60 GigaSample/sec through simulation in terms of its Effective Number of Bits (ENOB) and Spurious Free Dynamic Range (SFDR).