Photonic-Assisted Regenerative Microwave Frequency Divider With a Tunable Division Factor

Wideband Photonic Microwave Frequency Divider With Large Harmonic Suppression Capability

“…9(b) shows the frequency divider output electrical spectrum measured in a 100 MHz span centred at 8 GHz. Unlike the PMFDs implemented using the regenerative technique [11], there are no spur peaks around the 1/2 frequency component. In addition, over 70 dB SNR in a 100 kHz noise bandwidth is obtained.…”

“…Hao Chen and Erwin H. W. Chan are with Charles Darwin University, College of Engineering, IT and Environment, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia (e-mail: erwin.chan@cdu.edu.au). optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) loop [6]- [11]. The operating frequency range of these OEO based PMFDs is limited by the bandwidth of the electrical components such as microwave amplifier, phase shifter, bandpass filter and power splitter used in the structure.…”

Photonic‐assisted one‐third microwave frequency divider

“…Therefore, the main MZM bias voltage V b3 is used to control the roundtrip phase of the frequency divided signal to satisfy the phase condition given in (7). This is different from the previously reported injection locking and regenerative photonic microwave frequency dividers [3][4][5][6][7], which use an EPS or an OVDL to control the round-trip signal phase to satisfy the phase condition. Using V b3 to control the microwave signal phase has a number of advantages over the conventional electrical approaches.…”

“…The structure is similar to a conventional OEO [8], but the MZM is biased at the null point. Once the round-trip gain of the one-third frequency component is unity and the round-trip phase of the one-third frequency component is an integer times of 2π [5], a new microwave signal with a frequency that is one-third the input microwave frequency is generated at the output of the OEO. This can be done by controlling the EA gain and the DC bias voltage of the main MZM in the DPMZM, which can be seen from the analysis given in the following section.…”

“…Several photonics-based microwave frequency divider structures have recently been reported. Most of them use an optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) to realise frequency division through injection locking [2,3] or based on regenerative technique [4][5][6][7]. Both techniques require a precise control of the gain and phase, a condition needed for frequency division at a given input frequency.…”