  Novel analog-to-digital converter (ADC) architectures are motivated by the
demand for rising sampling rates and effective number of bits (ENOB). The main
limitation on ENOB in purely electrical ADCs lies in the relatively high jitter
of oscillators, in the order of a few tens of fs for state-of-the-art
components. When compared to the extremely low jitter obtained with
best-in-class Ti:sapphire mode-locked lasers (MLL), in the attosecond range, it
is apparent that a mixed electrical-optical architecture could significantly
improve the converters' ENOB. We model and analyze the ENOB limitations arising
from optical sources in optically enabled, spectrally sliced ADCs, after
discussing the system architecture and implementation details. The phase noise
of the optical carrier, serving for electro-optic signal transduction, is shown
not to propagate to the reconstructed digitized signal and therefore not to
represent a fundamental limit. The optical phase noise of the MLL used to
generate reference tones for individual slices also does not fundamentally
impact the converted signal, so long as it remains correlated among all the
comb lines. On the other hand, the timing jitter of the MLL, as also reflected
in its RF linewidth, is fundamentally limiting the ADC performance, since it is
directly mapped as jitter to the converted signal. The hybrid nature of a
photonically enabled, spectrally sliced ADC implies the utilization of a number
of reduced bandwidth electrical ADCs to convert parallel slices, resulting in
the propagation of jitter from the electrical oscillator supplying their clock.
Due to the reduced sampling rate of the electrical ADCs, as compared to the
overall system, the overall noise performance of the presented architecture is
substantially improved with respect to a fully electrical ADC.
