Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate an all-optical architecture for the linearization of a phase-modulated interferometrically detected microwave photonic link. We couple off a small part of the phase-modulated signal and combine it with a pump lightwave to produce a comb of idlers in a cascaded four-wave mixing process. The phase-matching requirement of the cascaded process ensures that integer multiples of the original signal's temporal phase modulate each of the idlers. We accomplish the linearization by filtering, scaling, and recombining a subset of the idlers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a simultaneous third-order, fifth-order, and all even-order distortion free links in either intensity or phase-modulated architectures. We experimentally measure a 108.8-dB SFDR for the conventional link, 116.1 dB for the third-order distortion-free link, and 116.9 dB for the third-order and fifth-order distortion-free links, each in a 1-Hz bandwidth. We show that the experimentally measured SFDR improvement is primarily limited by an increased phase noise on the correction lightwaves. Specifically, we measure a 24.2-dB noise figure for the conventional link, 38.7 dB for the third-order distortion-free link, and 45 dB for the third-order and fifth-order distortion-free links. We discuss the source of this added noise and methods for mitigation in the future work, which could lead to a 134.8-dB SFDR in a 1-Hz bandwidth for a shot noise limited link with ∼1 mA per photodiode.

© 2016 IEEE

Linearization of phase-modulated analog optical links using a four-wave mixing comb source

Amit Bhatia, Hong-Fu Ting, and Mark A. Foster
Opt. Express 22(25) 30899-30909 (2014)

Third-order intermodulation distortion elimination of microwave photonics link based on integrated dual-drive dual-parallel Mach–Zehnder modulator

Jian Li, Yi-Chen Zhang, Song Yu, Tianwei Jiang, Qian Xie, and Wanyi Gu
Opt. Lett. 38(21) 4285-4287 (2013)

Simultaneous even- and third-order distortion suppression in a microwave photonic link based on orthogonal polarization modulation, balanced detection, and optical sideband filtering

Xiuyou Han, Xiang Chen, and Jianping Yao
Opt. Express 24(13) 14812-14827 (2016)

Integrated InP frequency discriminator for Phase-modulated microwave photonic links

J. S. Fandiño, J. D. Doménech, P. Muñoz, and J. Capmany
Opt. Express 21(3) 3726-3736 (2013)

Elimination of odd and even intermodulation distortions of analog microwave photonics link based on GaAs MZMs

Shemsi Shaqiri, Shyqyri Haxha, and Taimur N. Mirza
Opt. Express 28(12) 17521-17531 (2020)