A novel optical mm-wave generation scheme based on three parallel Mach–Zehnder modulators

Abstract

We propose a novel optical mm-wave generation scheme based on three parallel Mach–Zehnder modulators (MZMs) for the first time. First, the scheme is investigated theoretically, which suggests that it can be used for sextupling, 12-tupling, and 18-tupling mm-wave generation. Then simulation results are given, 60GHz mm-wave is generated from 5GHz, or 10GHz RF oscillator based on frequency 12-tupling or sextupling, and 90GHz mm-wave is generated from 5GHz RF oscillator based on frequency 18-tupling. The optical sideband suppression ratio (OSSR) and the radio frequency spurious suppression ratio (RFSSR) are analyzed by simulation, in which several non-ideal factors are taken into consideration. Results indicate that all the three mm-wave generation methods are practical and very good performance can be obtained when the extinction ratio of the MZM is 30dB, even if the extinction ratio of the MZM is 20dB, the performance is still good, especially for the sextupling mm-wave generation method, whose performance is excellent and insensitive to the extinction ratio of MZM, the non-ideal RF driving voltage and the non-ideal DC bias. At last, we set up a RoF system by simulation to verify the transmission performance of the scheme. The BER performance and eye diagrams are given.