Generation of pure electrical quadrature amplitude modulation with photonic vector modulator.

A photonic vector modulator architecture for generating pure quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signals is presented. An electrical quadrature-modulated signal at microwave-millimeter-wave frequencies is generated from its corresponding baseband in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) components. In the proposed scheme, no electrical devices apart from the electrical tone oscillator are needed in the generation process.