Frequency-Quadrupling Optoelectronic Oscillator for Multichannel Upconversion

A frequency-quadrupling dual-loop optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) is proposed and demonstrated by two cascaded polarization modulators. The introduction of frequency quadrupling to the proposed OEO requires no optical filtering, which not only increases the maximal achievable frequency by four times, but also enables powerful optical signal processing functions. An experiment is carried out. A high-quality millimeter-wave signal at 39.75 GHz is generated using low-frequency devices. Photonic microwave upconversion at two wavelength channels is also demonstrated on the basis of the proposed frequency-quadrupling OEO.