Compact photonic triangular waveform generator with wideband tunability

Wenjuan Chen; Dan Zhu; Shilong Pan

doi:10.1117/1.OE.57.10.106106

22 October 2018 Compact photonic triangular waveform generator with wideband tunability

Wenjuan Chen, Dan Zhu, Shilong Pan

Author Affiliations +

Optical Engineering, Vol. 57, Issue 10, 106106 (October 2018). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.OE.57.10.106106

Abstract

A compact triangular waveform generator, consisting of a laser diode, a single dual-output Mach–Zehnder modulator (DOMZM), a variable optical delay line and a balanced photodetector (BPD), is proposed and experimentally demonstrated, using a single-frequency RF signal as the input. The DOMZM is biased at the quadrature point, so that no even-order harmonics of the RF frequency would be generated after the BPD. Then, the modulation index is properly selected to let the generated electrical first- and third-order harmonics approximately equal those of the triangular waveform. The use of the balanced detection not only increases the output power by 6 dB but also removes the DC component and the common-mode noise. No optical filtering is required, which guarantees the simplicity and wide frequency range of the system. A proof-of-concept experiment is carried out. Triangular waveforms with repetition rate tuning from 1 to 13 GHz are successfully generated, with the even-order harmonics suppressed by more than 54 dB.

Citation Download Citation

Wenjuan Chen, Dan Zhu, and Shilong Pan "Compact photonic triangular waveform generator with wideband tunability," Optical Engineering 57(10), 106106 (22 October 2018). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.OE.57.10.106106

Received: 28 December 2017; Accepted: 2 October 2018; Published: 22 October 2018

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