RF photonic front-end integrating with local oscillator loop

Broadband Radio frequency (RF) photonic front-ends are one of the vital applications of the microwave photonics. A tunable and broadband RF photonic front-end integrating with the optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) based local oscillator has been proposed and experimentally demonstrated, in which only one phase modulator (PM) is employed thanks to the characteristic of the PM. The silicon-on-insulator based narrow-bandwidth band-pass filter is introduced for signal processing. The application condition of the proposed RF photonic front-end has been discussed and the performance of the front-end has also been measured. The SFDR at a frequency of about 7.02 GHz is measured to be 88.6 dB-Hz(2/3).