Segment Reception of Broadband Millimeter-Wave for Reducing ADC Bandwidth Requirements

• Published in: Journal of lightwave technology 2024-11, Vol.42 (21), p.7619-7627
• Main Authors: Xue, Hanxiao, Song, Chunqi, Zheng, Zhennan, Yang, Jiasi, Zhang, Hao, Zou, Xinhang, Zhao, Wanqi, Gao, Xinlu, Huang, Shanguo
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: ADC; Analog to digital converters; Bandwidth; Bandwidths; Broadband; Broadband communication; coherent receiver; Integrated optics; Microwave photonics; Millimeter waves; mm-wave; Modulation; Optical modulation; Optical polarization; Optical receivers; orthogonally polarized; segment reception; Segments; Spectrum allocation
• ISSN: 0733-8724; 1558-2213
• DOI: 10.1109/JLT.2024.3431690

In order to meet the increasing bandwidth demand and solve the problem of limited analog-to-digital converter (ADC) bandwidth, we propose a novel and simple segment reception architecture of broadband mm-wave signal. Two orthogonally polarized local oscillator (LO) signals are used to divide the spectrum of the received mm-wave signal into two parts, which can reduce the ADC bandwidth requirements of the receiver by half. The structure takes advantage of the large processing bandwidth of microwave photonics, which provides the potential to meet the requirements of data rate growth in a cost-effective way. In the proof-of-concept experiments, two LOs are used to slice the 20 GBaud QPSK signal into two segments with incomplete spectrum. After splicing, the EVM of 20 GBaud QPSK signal is 21.33% and 18.60%, by the homologous and non-homologous structure, respectively. The results of both structures show good performance and no significant splicing loss. The proposed segment receiver is easy to expand to multiple paths and highly flexible, suitable for different bandwidths from several GHz to hundreds of GHz.