Generation and Modulation of Tunable mm-Wave Optical Signals Using Semiconductor Ring Laser

Abstract

Optical injection locking and cavity enhanced four-wave mixing in semiconductor ring lasers have been used to generate data modulated millimeter (mm)-wave optical signals. The scheme is shown to have multigigahertz (multi-GHz) modulation bandwidth. The 4-Gb/s data is transferred directly from an intensity modulated optical signal onto an mm-wave optical signal with the mm-wave frequency tunable in steps of 62.5 GHz and with flexible radio-frequency modulation formats over the optical carrier. Bit-error-rate and eye-diagram measurements confirm excellent signal quality.