Photonic microwave waveforms generation based on time-domain processing

Abstract

A new photonic approach of microwave waveform generator based on time-domain synthesis is proposed and experimentally demonstrated, in which two single-drive Mach-Zehnder modulators biased at quadrature point are severed as optical pulse carvers and various microwave waveforms can be generated by carving and overlapping optical field envelopes. The theoretical analysis and simulation are developed. In experiment, a square waveform with 50% duty cycle, triangular waveform with full duty cycle, and sawtooth (or reversed-sawtooth) waveform with 50% duty cycle are generated. Furthermore, a frequency doubling sawtooth (or reversed-sawtooth) waveform with full duty cycle is also obtained.

Advances on silicon-based integrated microwave photonics

“…This is because they have distinct advantages in terms of ultra-wide bandwidth, flexible tunability, and immunity to electromagnetic interference. The applications of microwave photonics cover civil use and military project, such as electronic countermeasure, radar system [1], wireless communications [2], sensing, optical ultra-wide band (UWB) signal generation [3,4], all photonic temporal differentiator [5,6], and test of optical communication system. The trend in microwave photonic systems research is towards integration and chip miniaturization, which will result in advanced multi-component chips with greatly reduced size and weight compared to the conventional discrete component approach.…”

Performance study of optical triangular-shaped pulse generation with full duty cycle

“…[10], Li et al proposed a frequency-doubled triangular pulse (full duty cycle) signal generator, which requires a dual-parallel MZM driven by a sinusoidal signal. Except for the above approaches [5][6][7][8][9][10] , a triangular-shaped signal can also be generated by using optical polarization manipulation [11] , time domain processing [12] , nonlinear polarization rotation [13] , stimulated Brillouin scattering [14] , and an optoelectronic oscillator [15] . In Ref.…”

“…In Ref. [12], a scheme of multiple waveform (including the triangular shape) generation is proposed based on time domain processing. By combining two rectangular-shaped waveforms with a specific time mismatching, triangular-shaped pulses can be generated.…”

“…Different from the approach in Ref. [12], this proposal can generate a triangular pulse in the optical domain, which will enhance its application in all-optical processing.…”

“…To figure out the differences between our scheme and the work in Ref. [12], we conduct the scheme in Ref. [12] and our proposal under the same simulation environment.…”