A microwave photonic mixer based on Stimulated Brillouin Scattering with high image rejection capacity

Abstract

The electrical mixer is limited by operation bandwidth and parallel processing capacity, and is suffering from increasingly serious electro-magnetic interference. By introducing photonic properties, microwave photonic technology has many advantages compared to the traditional microwave technology, such as low loss, high bandwidth, high parallel processing capacity, anti-electromagnetic interference and so on. In this paper, a microwave photonic mixer based on Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS) with high image rejection capacity is proposed. Due to the high wavelength-selectivity and wideband tunability of the SBS process, the image rejection ratio of the mixer exceeds 45 dB over the IF range of 0.1 GHz to 2 GHz and the RF range of 2 GHz to 40 GHz. The maximum of the image rejection ratio reaches 46.4 dB, at the same time, the conversion efficiency of the mixer is −28 dB.