High-Performance Time-Interleaved Optical Sampling Based on Temporal Lenticular Lens

Optical sampling based on the temporal lenticular lens can eliminate the requirement of high-power laser pulses and the need of wavelength conversion. In this letter, we improve the spectrally efficient sampling scheme to process wideband optical signals applicable for communications. A parallel architecture based on time-interleaved sampling is demonstrated to increase the effective sampling rate. A 20-Gb/s signal is experimentally sampled and recovered at 80 GSample/s. The sampling system performance is measured and analyzed. The input optical frequencies from 40 to 80 GHz are characterized with an effective number of bits ranging from 4.2 to 3.5.