High sensitivity microwave phase noise analyzer based on a phase locked optoelectronic oscillator

Phase noise is a key parameter to evaluate the short-term stability of a microwave oscillator. This metric is of major concern for many applications. A phase locked loop (PLL) is widely used to extract the phase noise. However, due to the limitation of the phase noise of the reference, it is still a technical challenge to precisely characterize the phase noise of a high frequency carrier. To address this issue, we propose a high sensitivity microwave phase noise analyzer by using a photonic-based reference. By combining an optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) and a direct digital synthesizer, we achieve a 9 GHz to 11 GHz frequency tunable reference with phase noise of -140 dBc/Hz at 10 kHz offset, side-mode suppression ratio of 128 dB, and frequency switching time of 176 ns. Thanks to this low phase noise reference, we attain an X-band phase noise analyzer with an excellent sensitivity of -139 dBc/Hz at 10 kHz offset without cross-correlation. This is the first time to realize a PLL-based phase noise analyzer utilizing an OEO. We thoroughly present a theoretical analysis of our proposed system. Benefiting from the OEO's phase noise independent of frequency, the operation frequency of our proposed system can be extended to the millimeter-wave range while maintaining high sensitivity.