Multi-band microwave signals generation based on a photonic sampling with a flexible ultra-short pulse source

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a photonic sampling-enabled multi-band microwave signals generation scheme. The intermediate-frequency input signal is up-converted to high frequency output signals in multiple frequency bands, after being optically sampled by an ultra-short optical pulse train and subsequently being detected by a photodetector (PD). The ultra-short pulse source, realized by using an electro-optic modulation-based time lens with the chirp compensation, can be flexibly adjusted to enhance the performance of multi-band frequency up-conversion. In the experiment, after optimizing the optical ultra-short pulse source with a repetition frequency of 8 GHz, ten phase-coded up-converted microwave signals with a 13-bit Barker code were successfully generated within a frequency range from 7 GHz to 41 GHz. The power fluctuation among the generated microwave signals in multi-band is measured to be 5.9 dB. The experiment results indicate that, our proposed scheme can realize the multi-band up-conversion with a high fidelity.