Mistura e geração experimental de sinais de microonda empregando amplificadores opticos semicondutores

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

1998

RESUMO

Recently, the development of techniques that allow optical transmission and generation of microwave and millimetre-wave signals have received significant attention, mainly due to the fact that considerably low-noise optical wavelenght-division multiplexed systems are available to transmit large amounts of data throughout many points interconnected by optical fibre before antenna radiation, improving overall system noise figure. Many techniques for transmission and reception in these systems require complex and costly schemes to achieve reasonable performance. In this work, a technique for microwave and, potentially, millimetre-wave generation, using commercially available devices, is proposed. Basically, a simple coherent-type system uses the cross-gain saturation property of semiconductor optical amplifiers to mix the fundamental and harmonic frequencies of a modulated local oscillator laser signal with those of an also modulated incoming optical carrier. By carefully choosing the optical signal modulation frequencies, components at the sum and difference frequencies can be observed within the microwave bandwidth after photodetection. This work demonstrates experimentally that the semiconductor optical amplifier cross-gain property can be used in the mixing of two 8-nm spaced modulated optical carriers. In a first experiment, the mixing property was investigated for one and two optical amplifiers. It was observed a superior performance for the two-amplifier set-up, since the detected sum and difference components, at 650 and 150 MHz, respectively, had a 20 dB power level gain in relation to the one amplifier application. The experiment was then repeated with different optical signal modulation frequencies and resulted in 1,7 GHz and 300 MHz for the sum and difference frequencies, respectively, despite the low power level for these components, mainly due to technical limitations

ASSUNTO(S)

moduladores de luz receptores de microondas amplificadores oticos detecção de sinais

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