Microwave photonics channelized receiver utilizing a gain-switched optical frequency comb and optical injection locking.

A channelized receiver based on a gain-switched optical frequency comb (OFC) and optical injection locking (OIL) is proposed and demonstrated. By introducing OIL, a specific comb line from a gain-switched OFC can be precisely selected and amplified to serve as a photonic local oscillator (LO). This approach leads to a significant reduction in size, weight, and power (SWaP) compared with the dual-OFC channelization architecture. In addition, a dual-output image-reject mixer (IRM) based on a balanced-Hartley structure is utilized for the in-band image-rejection. A proof-of-concept experiment is performed. The RF channelization across 6 channels over the 10.5 GHz-19.5 GHz frequency range is validated. The in-band image is suppressed by more than 23.5 dB for all channels.