Optical Millimeter-Wave Up-Conversion Employing Frequency Quadrupling Without Optical Filtering

This study presents two optical frequency quadrupling techniques for generating high-purity millimeter-wave signals with optical carrier suppression. To our best knowledge, this investigation demonstrates for the first time that a frequency quadrupling system requires only a single integrated Mach–Zehnder modulator without an optical narrowband filter to remove undesired optical sidebands. Since no optical filter is needed, fast frequency tuning is straightforward and this approach is particularly attractive for the optical up-conversion in the wavelength-division-multiplexing radio-over-fiber systems. This study provides both theoretical analysis and experimental demonstration. The generated optical millimeter-wave signals are of very high quality with optical carrier and undesired harmonic distortion suppression ratio of more than 36 dB.