Photonic Generation of Reconfigurable Ternary Modulated Microwave Signals with a Large Frequency Range

A photonic scheme generating ternary modulated signals, which include amplitude, phase, and frequency modulated signals, has been proposed and demonstrated. This scheme is based on a dual-polarization dual-parallel Mach-Zehnder modulator (DP-DPMZM), where the X-DPMZM is used to generate an optical frequency comb (OFC), and the Y-DPMZM is utilized to accomplish ternary modulation. The key feature of this scheme is that ternary modulated signals with eight wavebands can be obtained by using only the DP-DPMZM in situations of different input signals. In the simulation, a 2.5 Gbit/s amplitude shift keying (ASK), phase shift keying signal (PSK), or an 8 GHz bandwidth linearly frequency modulated (LFM) signal are obtained. The generated signals have eight wavebands with a large frequency range from 10 GHz to 80 GHz. Moreover, the recovery and pulse compression performances of the generated signals are evaluated.