Critical Performance Enhancement of Ultrahigh-Bandwidth Microwave Photonic Links through Nonlinear Photonic Signal Processing.

摘要

In the second quarter of this research program we have focused on the noise performance and SFDR of the amplitude-encoded link. To overcome limitations from stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) we have begun to investigate a sampling-based microwave photonic architecture in this quarter. By making use of the nonlinear optical process of self-phase modulation (SPM), we have implemented a first realization of this sampling-based approach where we achieve 8-dB of signal gain for a 20-GHz bandwidth link with 3.6-dB improvement in OIP3 and 3.1-dB improvement in OIP2 with no power limitations from SBS. Using SPM in this sampling-based architecture provides numerous approaches to achieve distortion correction and increased signal gain while maintaining a low noise figure for the link. This parameter space will be explored in the third quarter of the research program. Additional research in the second quarter of this research program include investigation of noise correlations in the cascaded fourwave mixing (FWM) based comb generators and the development of a compressive-sensing based architecture for extremely rapid ultrawide-bandwidth microwave spectrum sensing. This research program currently supports two full-time graduate students pursuing their doctoral degree. In addition, two undergraduate students are currently participating in the research program and are receiving a small amount of support from this grant.