All-optical microwave signal processing based on optical phase modulation
Creators: name: Zeng, Fei
Publisher: name: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Year: 2007
Subjects: subject: Engineering, Electronics and Electrical.
subject: Physics, Optics.

description: This thesis presents a theoretical and experimental study of optical phase modulation and its applications in all-optical microwave signal processing, which include all-optical microwave filtering, all-optical microwave mixing, optical code-division multiple-access (CDMA) coding, and ultrawideband (UWB) signal generation. All-optical microwave signal processing can be considered as the use of opto-electronic devices and systems to process microwave signals in the optical domain, which provides several significant advantages such as low loss, low dispersion, light weight, high time bandwidth products, and immunity to electromagnetic interference. In conventional approaches, the intensity of an optical carrier is modulated by a microwave signal based on direct modulation or external modulation. The intensity-modulated optical signal is then fed to a photonic circuit or system to achieve specific signal processing functionalities. The microwave signal being processed is usually obtained based on direct detection, i.e., an opto-electronic conversion by use of a photodiode. In this thesis, the research efforts are focused on the optical phase modulation and its applications in all-optical microwave signal processing. To avoid using coherent detection which is complicated and costly, simple and effective phase modulation to intensity modulation (PM-IM) conversion schemes are pursued. Based on a theoretical study of optical phase modulation, two approaches to achieving PM-IM conversions are proposed. In the first approach, the use of chromatic dispersion induced by a dispersive device to alter the phase relationships among the sidebands and the optical carrier of a phase-modulated optical signal to realize PM-IM conversion is investigated. In the second approach, instead of using a dispersive device, the PM-IM conversion is realized based on optical frequency discrimination implemented using an optical filter. We show that the proposed PM-IM conversion schemes can be implemented by use of commercially available devices without increasing significantly the system complexity compared to IM-based systems. More importantly, the PM-IM conversions bring a number of very interesting features which would be used to implement different signal processing functionalities. First, the PM-IM conversion plus direct detection has a frequency response with a notch at the dc, this feature can be used to achieve all-optical microwave bandpass filtering. Second, in the PM-IM conversion based on frequency discrimination, the polarity of the detected electrical signal can be easily reversed by simply tuning the optical wavelength, which provides the possibility to achieve bipolar operation, a feature highly desirable and extremely important in all-optical microwave signal processing. In this thesis, the use of the PM-IM conversion features for all-optical signal processing is investigated. Specifically, (1) We propose and demonstrate three different filter architectures for all-optical microwave bandpass filtering. (2) We propose and demonstrate, for the first time, an all-optical microwave signal processor that can realize all-optical mixing and filtering simultaneously. (3) We propose and demonstrate a scheme to implement unipolar-bipolar phase-time encoding/decoding for optical CDMA. (4) UWB pulses are usually generated in the electrical domain for short-range high-data rate wireless communications. To extend its coverage, UWB signal distributed over optical fiber is a topic of interest recently. In the thesis, we propose and demonstrate two approaches to generating and distributing UWB pulses in the optical domain.