Photonic Millimeter Wave Transmitter for a Real-Time Coherent Wireless Link Based on Injection Locking of Integrated Laser Diodes

Abstract

We propose the concept of an integrated coherent photonic wireless transmitter based on the simultaneous injection locking of two monolithically integrated distributed feedback (DFB) laser diodes (LDs) using an optical frequency comb (OFC). We characterize the basic operation of the transmitter and demonstrate that two injection-locked integrated DFB LDs are sufficiently stable to generate the carrier signal using a uni-traveling-carrier photodiode (UTC-PD) for a real-time error-free (bit error rate: BER < 10^-11) coherent transmission with a data rate of 10 Gbit/s at a carrier frequency of 97 GHz. In the coherent wireless transmission, we compare the BER characteristics of the injection-locked transmitter with that of an actively phase-stabilized transmitter and show that the power penalty of 8-dB for the injection-locked transmitter is due to the RF spurious components, which can be reduced by integrating the OFC generator (OFCG) and LDs on the same chip. Our results suggest that the integration of the OFCG, DFB LDs, modulators, semiconductor optical amplifiers, and UTC-PD on the same chip is a promising strategy to develop a practical real-time ultrafast coherent millimeter/terahertz wave wireless transmitter.