Flexible generation of 28 Gbps PAM4 60 GHz/80 GHz radio over fiber signal by injection locking of direct multilevel modulated laser to spacing-tunable two-tone light

To meet the ever-increasing bandwidth demands in the future broadband wireless networks, the millimeter-wave (mm-wave) frequency region is being actively perused, owing to its broad bandwidth and high frequencies. In this paper, a photonic mm-wave system is proposed and experimentally demonstrated based on the injection locking of a direct multilevel modulated laser to a spacing-tunable two-tone light. Since the mm-wave frequency of the generated signal is locked to the frequency spacing of the injected two-tone light, it shows better frequency stabilization than the schemes based on two free-running lasers. Moreover, by simply tuning the tone spacing, the mm-wave frequency could be easily re-configured, offering flexibility in the mm-wave signal generation. Instead of using complex and expensive optical modulators, the multilevel modulation on the mm-wave data carrier is implemented through the direct multilevel modulation of a laser and the injection locking. A 28 Gbps four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM4) is realized by biasing a 10 G-class laser at a current far from the threshold, providing a cost-effective and simple mm-wave generation scheme. In the experiment, a photonic approach to generating 28 Gbps PAM4 60 GHz/80 GHz mm-wave signals is experimentally demonstrated. A power penalty of less than 0.2 dB is observed for the filtered-out PAM4 signals with respect to the original PAM4. Besides, an ultra-low phase noise of up to −98 dBc/Hz is obtained for the mm-wave carriers after the injection locking. The proposed scheme possesses the flexibility and frequency stability of the mm-wave frequency, and also has low cost and implementation complexity.