Coupled optoelectronic oscillators for generating both RF signal and optical pulses

We present experimental results of coupled optoelectronic oscillators (COEO) constructed with a semiconductor optical amplifier-based ring laser and a semiconductor colliding pulse mode-locked laser. Each COEO can simultaneously generate short optical pulses and spectrally pure radio frequency (RF) signals. With these devices, we obtained optical pulses as short as 6.2 ps and RF signals as high, in frequency, as 18.2 GHz with a spectral purity comparable with an HP83731B synthesizer. These experiments demonstrate that COEO's are promising compact sources for generating low jitter optical pulses and low phase noise RF/millimeter wave signals.