Millimetre-wave optical harmonic mixer employing a single Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator

We investigate theoretically and experimentally a millimeter-wave optical harmonic upconverter based on a single Mach-Zehnder external modulator biased at the quadrature an linear operating points, carrying out a comparison with the traditional cascaded approach. This optical mixing technique provides a lower optical insertion loss at a lower cost as well as similar conversion loss and isolation performance to the traditional cascaded optical modulators mixing approach. A BER of less than 10¿9 is achieved by using this single MZ- EOM upconversion scheme in the quadrature and minimum transmission bias points for a 50 km single mode fibre transmission of a 34 Mbits/s PRBS signal, demonstrating that this approach is suitable for broadband applications in the millimetre-wave band.