A NOVEL ANALOG-TO-DIGITAL CONVERSION ARCHITECTURE USING ELECTRON WAVE-GUIDES

We have demonstrated a novel analog-to-digital (A/D) conversion architecture based on the quantized conductance of electron waveguides. In our scheme, a dual electron waveguide (DWG) device implements a binary quantizer and encoder for one significant bit of resolution. The conductance values of the on and off states in the binary code are 2e2/h and zero, respectively. By cascading multiple DWG devices, higher order significant bits can be attained. In this paper, we demonstrate the first significant bit and the second significant bit of our analog-to-digital conversion architecture using a DWG device fabricated in an AlGaAs/GaAs modulation-doped heterostructure.