Data Conversion Process
Michael Olorunfunmi Kolawole · Electronics · 2020
There is a strong motivation behind exploring a novel frontier of data processing that could benefit from cutting-edge miniature and power-efficient nanostructured silicon photonic devices. Recent example is photonic accelerator—a processor that can process time-serial data either in an analog or digital fashion on a real-time basis. Data processing is a way of converting data into a machine-readable form using a predefined sequence of operations. Communications signals can be analog or digital, and information can be transmitted using analog or digital signals. Analog signals are continuously changing in time (or frequency), while digital signals are discrete in time and amplitude. Interchangeability of information transfer allows the development of conversion processes without loss of detail. The challenge is to achieve a high sampling rate and high conversion accuracy in the presence of component mismatch, nonlinearity errors, and noise. Although the electronic circuits required to do this conversion processing can be quite complex, the basic idea is fairly simple. The basic concepts of data conversion and their inherent errors, as well as the choice of the converter types that strongly influence the architecture of the overall system and that are fundamental to the continuing revolution in information technology and communication systems, are explained in this chapter.