All-optical generation of binary phase-coded microwave pulses without baseband components based on a dual-parallel Mach–Zehnder modulator

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an all-optical system for the generation of binary phase-coded microwave pulses without baseband components. The scheme is based on a dual-parallel Mach-Zehnder modulator (DPMZM). By properly applying the coding signals and the microwave signals to the precisely biased DPMZM, accurate π phase shift binary phase-coded microwave pulses without baseband components can be generated. The proposed system has an extremely simple and stable all-optical structure, leading to a large frequency tuning range and a high signal quality. The operation of the system is very easy. The generation of the 2-Gbit/s 14-GHz and 4-Gbit/s 16-GHz binary phase-coded microwave pulses under different coding signal amplitudes and microwave carrier powers are experimental verified. The results show that the proposed binary phase-coded microwave pulses generation system has high quality and performance.