Direct photonic generation of electrical vector modulations at microwave/millimeter-wave frequencies

In this letter, a novel quadrature photonic vector modulator architecture is proposed. An electrical quadrature-modulated signal at microwave/millimeter-wave frequencies is generated from its corresponding base-band 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 and, therefore, high data rates at high electrical frequencies can be obtained. In addition, the hardware requirements are reduced when compared to previously proposed architectures so a highly compact low-cost architecture can be implemented. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the architecture.