10 Gsample/s optoelectronic A/D converter

A 5 bit, 10 Gsample/s flash A/D converter (ADC) is fabricated for 10 Gbit/s optical receivers. To achieve a 10 Gsample/s rate with wide signal bandwidth, the design focuses 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 10 Gsample/s.