Broadband RF front-end using microwave photonics filter.

ABSTRACT

We propose and demonstrate a novel RF front-end with broadened processing bandwidth, where a tunable microwave photonic filter based on optical frequency comb (OFC) is incorporated to accomplish simultaneous down-conversion and filtering. By designing additional phase shaping and time delay controlling, the frequency tunability of the system could be enhanced. More importantly, the beating interferences generated from broadband RF input could also be suppressed, which help to break the limitation on the processing bandwidth. In our experiments, a photonics RF receiver front-end for RF input with wide bandwidth of almost 20 GHz was realized using 10-GHz-space OFC, where the center frequency of the pass band signals could be tuned continuously.