Abstract
Radio-frequency (RF) waveform generators are key devices for a variety of
applications, including radar, ultra-wideband communications, and electronic test
measurements. Following advances in broadband coherent pulsed sources and pulse-shaping
technologies, reconfigurable RF waveform generators operating at bandwidths >1
GHz have become a reality. In this work, we demonstrate reconfigurable RF waveform
generation using broadband spectrally incoherent optical sources. This is achieved in
two steps. First, we implement an RF incoherent filter. The energy spectrum of the
optical source is conveniently apodized using a commercially available
computer-controlled D-WDM channel selector with 100-GHz resolution. The channel
controller provides high flexibility for shaping the optical source energy spectrum and,
hence, high reconfigurability capabilities in terms of the RF filter. Second, we show
that by applying a short baseband electrical waveform to the input of the RF filter, the
output RF spectrum of the electrical signal is a mapped version of the designed RF
filter transfer function. Specifically, we illustrate the capabilities of our technique
by generating RF signals with ~10 GHz bandwidth and tunable repetition rate. Finally, we
discuss how this method can be scaled up to the millimeter-wave range with current
technology.
© 2008 IEEE
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