Systems and methods are disclosed herein to provide various optical techniques. For example, in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention, a pulse position modulation discriminator architecture is disclosed for discriminating temporal positions of PPM-encoded optical pulses by converting them from time modulated to frequency modulated signals. As another example, time division multiplexed optical signals may be translated to wavelength division multiplexed optical signals. One or more of the architectures disclosed herein may be implemented, for example, to provide PPM to FM or time to wavelength conversion for receiver or transmitter applications.