Broadband radio frequency signal generation based on ultrafast optical pulse shaping, which is a typical microwave photonic technology, has been performed. The ultrafast optical pulse starts from our home-made mode-locked laser which has a repetition rate of ~171 MHz and spans from 1524 nm to 1593 nm. Following the MLL is an optical amplifier which makes up for the loss of the photonic link. A commercial pulse shaper is introduced to flatten and shape the spectrum of the optical pulse. However, it results in a additionally frequency cutoff. Only the C-band (5 THz optical bandwidth) is used efficiently which results in waste of spectrum resources. Then, the shaped pulses travel through a 5km long optical fiber realizing frequency-to-time mapping. The RF signal is acquired from the optical intensity profile by a high-speed photodetector at last. Several different kinds of wideband RF signals are generalized from the same hardware system, such as trigonometric and linear frequency-chirped waveform from 2 GHz up to 3 GHz, These results may be of interest to the radar and communication systems with ultraband RF signals.

Date Published: 29 March 2019
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 11046, Fifth International Symposium on Laser Interaction with Matter, 110461C (29 March 2019); doi: 10.1117/12.2524280

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 11046:
Fifth International Symposium on Laser Interaction with Matter
YiJun Zhao, Editor(s)