Abstract
A photonic method of highly reconfigurable microwave waveform generation based on time-wavelength interleaving has been proposed and experimentally demonstrated. By modulating multi-wavelength laser sources with Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZMs), multiple Nyquist pulses corresponding to different wavelengths are generated and overlapped with each other in the time domain. A dispersion compensation fiber (DCF) is used to separate these pulses due to the wavelength dependent delay. These pulses add together after photodetection and form desired waveforms. By controlling the wavelengths and powers of multiple laser sources, we can obtain various desired waveforms with tunable repetition rates and duty cycles. Experimentally, 9 waveforms including square, triangle, sawtooth, reversed-sawtooth and trapezoid with tunable repetition rates from 3 GHz to 6 GHz and duty cycles from 20.9% to 58.4% are obtained. This work demonstrates the great potential of incoherent time-domain synthesis for highly versatile arbitrary waveform generation.
Highlights
Microwave arbitrary waveform has wide application prospects in modern radar [1], signal processing [2], [3] and wireless communication system [4]
In order to verify the feasibility of the proposed scheme, the experimental demonstration based on the schematics in Fig. 1 is carried out
The experiments are mainly conducted with four tunable continues wave (CW) laser sources
Summary
Microwave arbitrary waveform has wide application prospects in modern radar [1], signal processing [2], [3] and wireless communication system [4]. Among all these applications, different waveforms play different roles. For example: Nyquist pulse is a good candidate for communication systems since data transmission rates can be maximized while the bandwidth usage is minimized [5], Square and triangular waveforms are important in optical frequency conversion, pulse compression and signal copy [6]. Photonic generation of microwave waveforms is considered as a promising solution due to the advantages of large bandwidth, high speed, and immunity to electromagnetic interference. The bandwidth of single Nyquist pulse is 40 GHz at 5 GHz and 15 GHz modulation, which means all the waveforms synthesized by these Nyquist pulses can have a maximum bandwidth
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