Abstract

This paper presents the architecture of a compact, robust, and broadly tunable RF receiver based on photonic direct conversion and digital feed-forward lasers noise cancellation. In the proposed solution, the incoming RF signal is filtered and down converted to baseband by means of an optical direct conversion (i.e., I/Q) receiving scheme (named here as signal receiver) fed by two free-running semiconductor lasers. At the same time, the beat noise of the free-running lasers is acquired by a second down-converter (reference sensor) fed by the same lasers. Then, the noise information is used by the digital feed-forward noise cancelling algorithm to enhance the frequency resolution provided by the signal receiver. The proposed strategy avoids complex lasers feedback-locking mechanisms, such as electrical/optical phased-locked loop or optical injection locking, as well as bulky RF components such as filters banks and synthesizers. An experimental validation shows an RF input range of 0–40 GHz, instantaneous bandwidth of 2 GHz, carrier noise of ∼−120 dBc/Hz (@ 4 kHz), out-of-band rejection >80 dB, and tuning response <10 μs. Implementing the scheme through integrated photonics technologies should enable increased environmental stability and a chip-scale form factor.

© 2018 IEEE

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