Photonic Generation of Dual-Band Dual-Format Phase-Coded Microwave Signals

We propose and demonstrate a photonic scheme to generate dual-band dual-format phase-coded microwave signals based on a commercial dual-polarization dual-drive Mach-Zehnder modulator (DP-DDMZM), which consists of two sub-DDMZMs with orthogonal polarization states. Two microwave signals with different frequencies are fed to the sub-DDMZMs, separately. The power of microwave signals is optimized to well suppress the optical carrier at the corresponding arms to avoid the optical interference between two arms of the sub-DDMZMs. The key novelty of our scheme is that two different kinds of phase-modulated microwave signals can be generated simultaneously. One is a binary phase-coded microwave signal in pulse mode, the other is an arbitrary phase-modulated signal in continuous wave mode. The proposed scheme is theoretically analyzed and experimentally verified.