All-optical DAC using counter-propagating optical and electrical pulses in a Mach-Zehnder modulator

A novel method of converting binary-level electrical pulses into multi-level optical pulses using only a conventional traveling-wave optical modulator is presented. The method provides low inter-pulse interference due to the counter-propagating pulses, low amplitude noise, and a timing jitter determined chiefly by the quality of the optical pulse source. The method only requires one electrical drive per modulator and provides low-jitter variable-amplitude optical pulses that are suitable for shaping into a wide variety of modulation formats using a programmable optical filter.