Photonic Generation of Spectrally Pure Millimeter-Wave Signals for 5G Applications

To support the multi-gigabit/s wireless connectivity and to overcome the wireless spectrum crunch, 5G is going to adopt higher frequencies from the plentiful available spectrum in the millimeter-wave range. Photonic millimeter-wave signals generation and distribution in the optical domain is of great interest owing to their high spectral purity, low system complexity, low cost, small footprint, and long transmission distance. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate spectrally pure photonic mm-wave signal generation and data transmission around 47.2 GHz using a novel low noises monolithic dual-wavelength semiconductor InAs/InP quantum dash (QD) DFB laser as a compact optical beat source for 5G applications.