High-stable and reconfigurable photonic generation of radio-frequency arbitrary waveforms with multi-tone inputs

Conventional temporal pulse shaping (TPS) for radio frequency (RF) arbitrary waveform generation (RF AWG) based on the Fourier transform relation between the input–output waveform pair requires the electronic AWG to generate RF input signal, which greatly limits the output waveform diversity due to the relative low sampling rate and bit resolution of electronic AWG, i.e., high-fidelity square waveforms are hard to be achieved since high-resolution broadband Sinc input signals are difficult to be generated by current commercial electronic AWGs. The approaches based on TPS with phase modulation incorporating with iterative algorithms can relatively improve the waveform diversity by applying the optimal phase information. However, time-consuming iterative algorithms significantly restrict the waveform reconfigurability, i.e., desired RF waveforms cannot be generated in real-time. We propose a novel high-stable and reconfigurable RF AWG scheme with multi-tone inputs, which aims to improve the output waveform diversity with simple manipulation and high stability. In our design, any desired RF waveform can be achieved in real-time by simply adjusting the power values of multi-tone inputs. A proof-of-concept experiment was implemented, which fully verified the feasibility of the approach. The system performance in terms of output waveform stability was investigated in detail. As no electronic AWG is employed and no iterative algorithms are required, the proposed design provides a promising solution for high-performance reconfigurable photonic-based RF arbitrary waveforms generation.