Experimental Investigation on Improved Predistortion Circuit for Directly Modulated Radio Over Fiber System

An extension of the conventional dual Schottky diode-based predistortion circuit (PDC) is proposed to linearize directly modulated radio over fiber (RoF) system. The main advantages of the proposed PDC are simple configuration, excellent distortion suppression, and broad bandwidth from dc to 6 GHz. By using the proposed cascaded Schottky diodes-based PDC, the condition of third-order intermodulation nonlinearities suppression can be more easily satisfied and the optimal linearization effect can be achieved due to the fact that it has more circuit adjustment parameters. The experimental results show that by using the proposed PDC, the spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) @2 GHz of the optical transceiver which is designed by ourselves can be improved from 93.8 dB·Hz 2/3 to 112.1 dB·Hz 4/5 in a 1-Hz bandwidth, corresponding to 7.21% error vector magnitude performance improvement for 20 MHz 64QAM-OFDM @2 GHz signal transmission over 10 km standard single mode fiber. The linearity improvement by using the proposed PDC has also been verified in a commercial optical transceiver based RoF system, and the achieved SFDR @ 2 GHz can be increased from 102.8 dB·Hz 2/3 to 121.6 dB·Hz 4/5 in a 1-Hz bandwidth.