UC San Diego

Discrete Fourier transform (DFT) has been one of the most fundamental tools in signal and image processing. With increasing demand of data traffic for applications such as media streaming, 5G communication and internet of things (IoT), broadband backend receivers require high performance DFT cores to meet the performance target. However, due to the tradeoff between bandwidth and precision of electronic digitizers and fundamentally limited computation capability of conventional silicon processors, it is challenging to perform DFT computation on broadband signals with all-electronic DFT processor. In this dissertation a new hybrid DFT processor relying on phase locked optical combs are introduced to circumvent these challenges.