Acta Optica Sinica, Vol. 34, Issue 2, 206001 (2014)

Upconversion by Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser Injection Locking

Abstract

A microwave photon upconversion scheme based on a vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) without local oscillator is proposed. The relatively low pseudo-random baseband signal is injected into the VCSEL, and the higher harmonics of the injected signal is used to lock the VCSEL. The injection-locked laser wavelength beats coherently with the original optical signal in the cavity which generates the upconverting amplitude modulated microwave signal. In the experiment, 2.5 Gb/s nonreturn-to-zero code intensity modulated signal is used to inject-lock the VCSEL, which achieves a carrier frequency of 14.3 GHz microwave photon upconversion without local oscillator, and the carrier phase noise is -81 dBc/Hz at 10 kHz frequency deviation. Furthermore, modulation of 7.5~23 GHz carrier frequency can be achieved by adjusting the wavelength and power of injection signal, and the feasibility of the scheme is verified. The bit error rate performance of the system is analyzed, and system consideration is 1.4 dB. The result shows that the upconversion signal can be achieved by only using the inexpensive VCSEL without microwave local oscillator, which provides a low cost solution idea for the wireless-optical hybrid access network photon microwave signal generation technique.

keywords

• all-optical frequency upconvesion
• injection locking
• optical communications
• vertical cavity surface emitting laser