Generation of Tunable Coherent Tri-Frequency Microwave Signals Based on Optoelectronic Oscillator

We report a coherent tri-frequency microwave signal generation approach using an optoelectronic oscillator (OEO). In the previous literature, the OEO-based schemes can only generate coherent microwave signals with dual frequencies. In this work, we demonstrate that the generation of coherent tri-frequency microwave signals is also possible using an OEO loop. The key component in our scheme is a tri-passband electrical filter, which has a narrow passband in the middle and two wide passbands on both sides. The OEO loop initially oscillates at the central frequency of the narrow passband with a single-tone f1. By injecting a microwave signal, finj, into the OEO loop, down- and up-converted microwave signals at frequencies of f2 = f1 − finj and f3 = f1 + finj, respectively, are generated by frequency mixing in a microwave mixer. The two wide passbands of the electrical filter allow the oscillation of the converted signals at a wide frequency bandwidth by simply tuning the frequency of the injected signal. Moreover, the tri-frequency microwave signals are phase-locked through frequency mixing and mutual injection locking. The proposed scheme is theoretically analyzed and experimentally validated. In the experiments, coherent tri-frequency microwave signals with low phase noise are successfully generated at a fixed frequency of 14 GHz and two tunable frequency ranges from 9 to 12 GHz and from 16 to 19 GHz, respectively.