Photonic mixers for wide bandwidth RF receiver applications

Optoelectronic mixers can exhibit a very wide bandwidth of operation with significantly reduced third-order intermodulation products. A 20 GHz bandwidth optoelectronic mixer has been constructed and characterized. The third-order intermodulation terms were demonstrated to be more than 70 dB below the IF output. The mixer was then incorporated into a simple superheterodyne receiver architecture, which was shown to have a tangential sensitivity of -66 dBm and a compressive dynamic range of 44 dB. System limitations and possible improvements are discussed.>