Photonic radio frequency arbitrary waveform generator based on an
integrated 49GHz FSR Kerr micro-comb source
Abstract
We report a photonic-based radio frequency (RF) arbitrary waveform
generator (AWG) using a soliton crystal micro-comb source with a free
spectral range (FSR) of 48.9 GHz. We successfully achieve arbitrary
shapes including square waveforms with a tunable duty ratio ranging from
10% to 90%, sawtooth waveforms with a tunable slope ratio of 0.2 to 1,
and a symmetric concave quadratic chirp waveform with an instantaneous
frequency of sub GHz. We achieve good agreement between theory and
experiment, validating the effectiveness of this approach towards
realizing high-performance, broad bandwidth, nearly user-defined RF
waveform generation.