US Patent Issued to TAIWAN SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURING on April 21 for "Optical analog-to-digital converter" (Taiwanese, American Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., April 21 -- United States Patent no. 12,609,771, issued on April 21, was assigned to TAIWAN SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURING COMPANY LTD. (Hsinchu, Taiwan).

"Optical analog-to-digital converter" was invented by Tai-Chun Huang (New Taipei City, Taiwan), Chewn-Pu Jou (Hsinchu, Taiwan) and Stefan Rusu (Sunnyvale, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An optical analog-to-digital converter (O-ADC) converts an input optical signal (IOS) into an output digital signal. The O-ADC includes ADC stages, each of which can generate an electrical bit of the output digital signal and an optical bit. An ADC stage can include a photodetector, an ADC circuit, and an optical output circuit. The phot...