Electro -optic microdisk RF -wireless receive

A self-homodyne photonic receiver for transmitted carrier wireless links is demonstrated. The key innovations in this photonic RF-receiver are the design and implementation of a resonant LiNbO3 microdisk electro-optic modulator and novel RF down-conversion techniques that exploit the sensitivity of the microdisk for efficient RF down-conversion in the optical domain. By careful RF and optical design, simultaneous photonic and RF resonance is achieved in a LiNbO3 microdisk modulator resulting in a sensitivity of -80 dBm at 14.6 GHz.;Two photonic RF down-conversion techniques are proposed to extract the baseband information from a RF signal that has a transmitted carrier modulation format. In the first approach we use an optical filter to modify the optical output spectrum of the microdisk modulator. Photodetection of the subsequent optical signal generates the baseband photocurrent. In the second technique the RF carrier and sidebands are mixed through nonlinear optical modulation in the microdisk and the down-converted signal is detected using a photodetector. In both cases the bandwidth of the photodetector and electronic circuitry are limited to that of the baseband signal. Receiver operation is demonstrated by demodulating up to 100 Mb/s digital data from a 14.6 GHz RF carrier frequency. Power efficiency, small volume, light weight and elimination of high-speed electronic components are the main specifications of the photonic RF-receiver that make it useful for applications like wireless LANs, fiber-feed backbone networks or video distribution systems.