Optical Comb Assisted OFDM RF Receiver

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is a widely used signaling format in wireless communication and ultrawide band radio-frequency (RF) applications. An OFDM transceiver relies on a discrete Fourier transform (DFT) processor that matches both the resolution and the bandwidth of wireless link. A conventional wideband OFDM receiver necessarily relies on high-speed analog-to-digital converters (ADC) followed by a Fourier processing core. Both fundamental and practical ADC considerations that include bandwidth-resolution tradeoff impose strict limits on high precision digitization of the wideband OFDM signal. In addition to the quantization barrier, computational complexity of the high-speed DFT processor leads to high dissipation levels in conventional receivers. This report demonstrates an alternative OFDM receiver architecture that eliminates the need for high-speed ADC and digital DFT processor. The new design is based on hybrid, optoelectronic DFT processor, capable of generating DFT coefficients of wideband RF signal in real time. We demonstrate demodulation of a 4-quadratic amplitude modulation OFDM signal with 60 subcarriers positioned within 4-15.8 GHz band and separated by 200 MHz. The error vector magnitude is measured for all channels to characterize the performance of the comb-assisted OFDM RF receiver.