High-Speed Photonic Power-Efficient Ultra-Wideband Transceiver Based on Multiple PM-IM Conversions

We experimentally demonstrate a novel photonic ultra-wideband (UWB) transceiver with pulse spectral efficiency of 50.97% and transmission speed up to 3.125 Gb/s. The UWB generator only consists of a highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF) and a commercial arrayed-waveguide grating (AWG). By using the concept of multiple cross-phase modulation in the HNLF and multiple phase modulation to intensity modulation conversions in the AWG, a power-efficient UWB pulse is combined with incoherent summation of two asymmetric monocycle pulses with inverted polarities. Benefiting from the ultra-fast response of fiber nonlinearities in the HNLF, on-off keying encoded UWB signals generated at 781.25 Mb/s, 1.5625 Gb/s, and 3.125 Gb/s are all error-free transmitted through a 22.5-km single-mode fiber (SMF) with power penalties lower than 1 dB. The bit-error rate is directly measured on down-converted baseband signals by using optical full rectification and electrical low-pass filtering technologies. The measured electrical spectra before and after 22.5-km SMF link transmission both fully comply with the spectral mask specified by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) without power attenuation.