Abstract
A waveguide-mounted photonic mixer employing a Uni-Traveling-Carrier Photodiode (UTC-PD), which is optically-pumped by two 1.55 μm lasers, has been built and tested as a millimeter-wave oscillator in the 75-115 GHz band. We have successfully demonstrated that the photonic mixer can produce an output power as high as ∼2 mW at 100 GHz with an input laser power of ∼100 mW. It is shown that the photonic mixer can provide a sufficient power required to pump an SIS mixer and that amplitude noise of the photonic mixer is as low as that of the Gunn diode in the 100 GHz band. This indicates that the photonic mixer is a promising candidate for a local oscillator source of a SIS mixer at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths.
