Performance Improvement in Analog Photonics Link Incorporating Digital Post-Compensation and Low-Noise Electrical Amplifier

In this paper, we investigate the performance improvement in analog photonics link incorporating digital signal processing technique and low-noise electrical amplifiers. The proposed linearization does not require to know the precise transfer function of the whole nonlinear system, which is achieved by directly acquiring the output third-order intercept point from the system hardware. Through using a high-performance pre- and post-amplifier, improved link noise figure and gain are obtained while the nonlinearity of the electrical amplifiers can be also compensated by the proposed algorithm. Experimentally, spurious-free dynamic range of 128.3 dB in 1-Hz bandwidth is achieved for a digitizer noise limited analog photonics link. The measured noise figure and gain of the photonics link are 8.9 and 27.5 dB, respectively.