Abstract
Low-phase-noise microwave oscillators are important to a wide range of subjects, including communications, radar and metrology. Photonic-based microwave-wave sources now provide record, close-to-carrier phase-noise performance, and compact sources using microcavities are available commercially. Photonics-based solutions address a challenging scaling problem in electronics, increasing attenuation with frequency. A second scaling challenge, however, is to maintain low phase noise in reduced form factor and even integrated systems. On this second front, there has been remarkable progress in the area of microcavity devices with large storage time (high optical quality factor). Here we report generation of highly coherent microwaves using a chip-based device that derives stability from high optical quality factor. The device has a record low electronic white-phase-noise floor for a microcavity-based oscillator and is used as the optical, voltage-controlled oscillator in the first demonstration of a photonic-based, microwave frequency synthesizer. The synthesizer performance is comparable to mid-range commercial devices.
Highlights
Low-phase-noise microwave oscillators are important to a wide range of subjects, including communications, radar and metrology
The technique is complex, emerging technologies like frequency microcombs[24,25] and compact reference cavities[26,27,28,29] could one day lead to chip-based photonic microwave sources that exceed the performance of the best electronic sources
The combined demonstrations show that the Brillouin voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) can operate as a direct replacement for conventional electronic VCO devices
Summary
Low-phase-noise microwave oscillators are important to a wide range of subjects, including communications, radar and metrology. The generation of low-phase-noise radio, microwave and optical signals relies upon resonant devices that feature large storage times or equivalently high-Q factors[1,2].
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