A novel microwave photonic link employing cascaded ring resonators as balanced optical discriminators

摘要

We report the design, fabrication and characterization of a balanced optical discriminator for a high performance phase modulation-direct detection microwave photonic link (MPL). The discriminator is an integrated optical filter consisting of five ring resonators which are fully tunable using thermo-optical tuning. The discriminator is configured to yield a desired transfer where the intensity transmission ramps linearly with the frequency. The performance of an MPL employing this discriminator is investigated. Measurement results on the MPL noise, linearity and spurious-free dynamic range are presented and discussed.