Photonic frequency up‐conversion of baseband pulses for IR‐UWB using optical beating and balanced coherent detection

Abstract

This article describes a photonic scheme that performs frequency up‐conversion of baseband pulses for potential applications on Impulse Radio‐Ultra Wideband systems. Mixing a laser modulated by a pulse with a wavelength‐tunable laser (local oscillator) and a coherent photodetection scheme we obtain high order pulses comparable with nth derivatives of a Gaussian pulse. With our approach is possible to perform the frequency translation of the baseband pulses so that UWB pulses within standardized UWB mask are obtained. Baseband components produced in the optical mixing are removed by using a balanced photodetection stage. Our scheme exploits two different microwave photonics technics (microwave generation and coherent detection) for accomplish a simple generator of high order pulses avoiding the use of complex schemes. Additionally, the scheme can be implemented with commercially available components and it is reconfigurable in a very simple way. The performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed and evaluated in this work.© 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 58:2749–2755, 2016