Parametric optical processes for microwave photonics

The ability to map a wideband signal to multiple, arbitrarily spaced new frequencies was long recognized as missing capability that could lead to fundamentally new means for signal processing and channel distribution. Its simplest form, frequency conversion, has been used in the past to reconfigure the link, but was also regarded as lossy and channel-impairing process. Indeed, conventional link design inherently associates any frequency conversion with finite performance penalty. As a consequence, very few links relied on frequency conversion and none of them, to the best of our knowledge, used frequency mapping for signal fan-out.