10-GSample/s Optoelectronic A/D Converter

A 5-bit, 10-GSample/s flash A/D converter (ADC) is fabricated for 10-Gb/s optical receivers. To achieve a 10 GSample/s rate with wide signal bandwidth, our design focus on reducing aperture uncertainty, clock skew, and metastability error. The ADC achieves 4.1 effective bits at low input frequencies and 2.8 effective bits at 4.9-GHz input signal at 10GSample/s.