Broadband microwave photonic frequency translator with a wide frequency shifting range

A microwave photonic topology for shifting the frequency of an input microwave signal is presented. It operates based on a single sideband frequency mixing approach. The amount of microwave signal frequency shift is determined by a local oscillator frequency. The proposed frequency translator (FT) has a large bandwidth and a wide frequency shifting range. It can be designed to obtain a large spurious signal suppression ratio and a low frequency translation loss. Results are presented for the novel structure, which demonstrates the realization of a 2–18 GHz FT with a 10 kHz to 100 MHz frequency shifting range. The results also show the spurious signals are more than 31 dB below the frequency-shifted signal, and a low loss of only around 4 dB for frequency shifting a 10 GHz microwave signal.