RF Photonics

Advanced RF and microwave functions based on an integrated optical frequency comb source

“…Photonic microwave and radio frequency (RF) signal processing [1][2][3] has attracted great interest for a wide range of applications such as radar and communications due to its very high performance such as broad bandwidths, very low loss, high versatility and reconfigurability, and strong immunity to electromagnetic interference. Many key functions have been realized, such as those based on RF time delays including phased array antennas (PAAs), microwave photonic filters (MPFs), analog-to-digital or digital-to-analog conversion, and arbitrary waveform generation [4][5][6][7], as well as RF spectrometers [8][9][10], high fidelity microwave tone generation [11] and many others.…”

“…Traditionally, this has been achieved via discrete laser arrays [16,[22][23][24] or FBG arrays [14][15], which, although offering advantages, have resulted in significantly increased complexity, as well as reduced performance due to a limited number of optical wavelengths and other factors. Alternative approaches, including those based on optical frequency comb (OFC) sources [12], can mitigate this problem, although they too can suffer from drawbacks such as the need for cascaded high frequency electro-optic (EO) [2,[25][26][27][28][29][30] and Fabry-Perot EO [31] modulators that in turn require high-frequency RF sources.…”

Simply configured Radio on Fiber link yielding positive gain for mobile phone system

“…Although the optical transmission loss of only the optical fiber is low, a radioon-fiber (RoF) analogue link, which employs a direct intensity modulation scheme for a laser diode (LD), generally has a higher level of transmission loss than the coaxial cable due to the electrical-to-optical (E/O) and optical-toelectrical (O/E) conversion losses. The transmission gain for this type of RoF analogue was reported to be !15 to !30 dB [5,6].…”

A Novel Measurement Approach for the Half-wave Voltage of Phase Modulator based on PM-MZI Photonic Link

“…The use of photonic approaches to transmit and process microwave signals has been an interesting research area for several decades, due to its advantages of large bandwidth, low loss, and immunity to electromagnetic interference (EMI) [1]. Owing to the more linear conversion of input voltage to optical phase and requiring no bias controller, the LiNbO 3 electro-optic phase modulator (PM) attracts a great deal of attention and has a host of applications [2,3], such as microwave photonic links [4], optoelectronic oscillators [5,6], optical comb generators, and all-optical microwave filters [7].…”