Compact photonic triangular waveform generator with wideband tunability

Abstract. A compact triangular waveform generator, consisting of a laser diode, a single dual-output Mach–Zehnder modulator (DOMZM), a variable optical delay line and a balanced photodetector (BPD), is proposed and experimentally demonstrated, using a single-frequency RF signal as the input. The DOMZM is biased at the quadrature point, so that no even-order harmonics of the RF frequency would be generated after the BPD. Then, the modulation index is properly selected to let the generated electrical first- and third-order harmonics approximately equal those of the triangular waveform. The use of the balanced detection not only increases the output power by 6 dB but also removes the DC component and the common-mode noise. No optical filtering is required, which guarantees the simplicity and wide frequency range of the system. A proof-of-concept experiment is carried out. Triangular waveforms with repetition rate tuning from 1 to 13 GHz are successfully generated, with the even-order harmonics suppressed by more than 54 dB.

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