Phase-stable, downconverting, microwave photonic link with analysis of balanced heterodyne detection intermodulation.

A coherent downconverting microwave photonic link using balanced heterodyne detection of single-sideband modulated optical signals is analyzed and demonstrated. The intermodulation analysis shows that the second-order photodetector nonlinearity can be the limiting factor in the third-order intermodulation spur performance. The link is designed to phase coherently downconvert 17 GHz of bandwidth in an extended K-band (23-45 GHz) to 1-18 GHz to match the capabilities of modern receivers.

Spatial-spectral holographic real-time correlative optical processor with >100 Gb/s throughput.

The demonstration of an all-optical, ultra-high-speed, time-domain signal correlator based on spatial-spectral holographic (SSH) technology is described. The fully programmable signal correlator demonstration operates asynchronously and continuously on signals with up to 32 GHz of bandwidth and correlative filter length exceeding a time-bandwidth product of 10, for the equivalent of teraflop-scale processing. Experimental demonstrations are presented that show both digital and analog correlation capability using phase-shift keyed modulation formats to search plain text ASCII data sources for arbitrary phrases at continuous line rate throughputs up to 200 Gbps with minimal latency.

Demonstrations of analog-to-digital conversion using a frequency domain stretched processor.

The first proof-of-concept demonstrations are presented for a broadband photonic-assisted analog-to-digital converter (ADC) based on spatial spectral holography (SSH). The SSH-ADC acts as a frequency-domain stretch processor converting high bandwidth input signals to low bandwidth output signals, allowing the system to take advantage of high performance, low bandwidth electronic ADCs. Demonstrations with 50 MHz effective bandwidth are shown to highlight basic performance with approximately 5 effective bits of vertical resolution.