Microwave photonic multi-frequency reconfigurable PSK/ASK/FSK formats modulation signals generation

Abstract

We report a novel photonic approach to generate reconfigurable multi-frequency multiple binary modulation formats microwave signals based on a dual-polarization dual-drive Mach-Zehnder modulator (DPol-DDMZM). Two radio frequency (RF) signals and two electrical coding signals are applied to the modulator. By simply setting the proper formats of the applied coding signals, multi-frequency phase shift keying (PSK), amplitude shift keying (ASK) and frequency shift keying (FSK) microwave signals can be generated successfully. Our proposed scheme has been theoretically analyzed and experimentally demonstrated. The tunability of the bit rates and center frequencies of the system has been also proved. No polarization controller (PC) or polarizer (Pol.) is involved, resulting in the independent polarization of the system. Compared with previous reports of single-frequency PSK/ASK/FSK format microwave signals generation system, our proposed simple and compact system realizes multi-frequency reconfigurable functions without the necessity of changing system structure, which can bring great potential application in the multi-frequency radar and communication systems.