Electro-Optic Millimeter-Wave Harmonic Downconversion and Vector Demodulation Using Cascaded Phase Modulation and Optical Filtering

We describe and demonstrate an electro-optic technique to simultaneously downconvert and demodulate vector-modulated millimeter-wave signals. The system uses electro-optic phase modulation and optical filtering to perform harmonic downconversion of the RF signal to an intermediate frequency (IF) or to baseband. We demonstrate downconversion of RF signals between 7 and 70-GHz to IFs below 20-GHz. Furthermore, we show harmonic downconversion and vector demodulation of 2.5-Gb/s QPSK and 5-Gb/s 16-QAM signals at carrier frequencies of 40-GHz to baseband.