BER and SFDR Characteristics of an FWM-Based All-Optical Frequency Upconverter

We have experimentally investigated the bit-error-rate (BER) and spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) characteristics of an all-optical frequency upconverter based on the four-wave-mixing effect in a semiconductor optical amplifier for radio-over-fiber networks. The generation and error-free transmission of an optical radio-frequency signal having 155.52-Mb/s differential phase-shift keying data at a carrier frequency of 26.5 GHz are achieved. The dynamic ranges of an optical intermediate frequency (IF) input signal estimated from the BER and SFDR measurements are approximately 12 and 16 dB, respectively. The SFDR of the upconverter is larger than 77 dBmiddotHz^2/3 for the IF frequencies ranging from 1 to 12 GHz.