An explosion in information technology during the past 50 years has placed the people of today within a data-driven digital world. Despite many information processes being transferred to the digital domain, it remains an indisputable fact that the information within physical properties are analog signals. As such, the analog-to-digital-converter (ADC) acts as a gateway between the two realms and its performance dictates the overall capability of an entire receiver system. Furthermore, although many different kinds of ADC architectures have been developed for different applications, the question of how to drive the ADCs still remains unanswered.

This work investigates a novel approach to achieving both high speed and high resolution analog-to-digital conversion. We leverage an optical system to perform low-jitter sampling and transfer that signal to the electronic domain by means of a photodiode. An electronic front-end is designed to interface with an array of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) pipelined ADCs to achieve an effective sampling rate of 10GS/s with 14 bits. The front-end also demonstrates its ability to drive the input of a COTS ADC. The targeted linearity for the entire system is an excess of 10 effective bits. The front-end is fabricated in TSMC 28nm CMOS technology and integrated with the photodiode, custom ADC board, and COTS FPGA board.