A path to realizing high-performance 100-GHz analog links

Communications and sensor systems on aircraft and other vehicles would benefit from the development of optical fiber links with low noise figure and high dynamic range over broad bandwidths extending to as high as 100 GHz. To date, however, there have been few reports of analog optical links that include their performance at f > 20 GHz, and the best unamplified noise figure [1] and dynamic range [2] results have been reported at ≤12 GHz. In this paper, we compare several competing link architectures, identify the one with the potential to yield high performance across a broad bandwidth up to 100 GHz, and discuss some of the challenges that must be overcome.