Dual-function photonic integrated circuit for frequency octo-tupling or single-side-band modulation

Abstract

A dual-function photonic integrated circuit for microwave photonic applications is proposed. The circuit consists of four linear electro-optic phase modulators connected optically in parallel within a generalized Mach-Zehnder interferometer architecture. The photonic circuit is arranged to have two separate output ports. A first port provides frequency up-conversion of a microwave signal from the electrical to the optical domain; equivalently single-side-band modulation. A second port provides tunable millimeter wave carriers by frequency octo-tupling of an appropriate amplitude RF carrier. The circuit exploits the intrinsic relative phases between the ports of multi-mode interference couplers to provide substantially all the static optical phases needed. The operation of the proposed dual-function photonic integrated circuit is verified by computer simulations. The performance of the frequency octo-tupling and up-conversion functions is analyzed in terms of the electrical signal to harmonic distortion ratio and the optical single side band to unwanted harmonics ratio, respectively.

Electro-optic up-conversion mixer amenable to photonic integration

“…Indeed, the drift of bias points in MZMs has been acknowledged as a serious issue and led to a substantial volume of literature on the physical mechanisms responsible [16,17], and its alleviation by sophisticated stabilization mechanisms [18][19][20][21]. Moreover, the present work builds up from recent demonstrations of frequency 8-tupled and 24-tupled millimeter wave signal generation utilizing the same circuit concept [22,23], and analyzes the photonic architecture for the specific application of optical upconversion mixing. Transfer matrices are used to represent the main building blocks in the proposed design, and hence to describe the operation of the entire optical up-conversion mixer.…”

Integrated Optical SSB Modulation / Frequency Shifting Using Cascaded Silicon MZM

“…Mehedi Hasan proposed for selective suppression of unwanted harmonics [6]. A notable advance on the design of the desired function is presented in [7] and a DC bias-less and filter-less scheme based on MMI couplers has been reported [8]. A silicon-based DP-MZM architecture for 1 GHz frequency shifting is reported in [9].…”

“…FFICIENT single side band suppressed carrier (SSB-SC) modulation technology for frequency conversion or shifting is a growing need and fundamental to radio frequency photonic systems. Starting from the very first demonstration [1] of an integrated SSB modulator based on a Ti-diffused LiNbO3 optical waveguide circuit driven by an in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) signal at 2 GHz, there has been a plethora of publications [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] describing different techniques for obtaining the desired functions. All the architectures presented in references [1][2][3][4][5][7][8][9] use circuits of Mach-Zehnder Modulators (MZM).…”

“…In this scheme, the optical carrier is modulated by the in-phase and quadrature component of the RF drive signal. However, a dualparallel Mach Zehnder Modulator (DP-MZM) is the most widely used solution because of its superior carrier and sideband suppression [3,5,[7][8][9]. In this scheme, two child MZM are biased at the minimum transmission point (MITP) while the parent MZM is kept at the quadrature bias point (QTP).…”