W-Band 8QAM Vector Millimeter-Wave Signal Generation Based on Tripling of Frequency Without Phase Pre-Coding

In this paper, we propose a W-band 8-quadrature-amplitude-modulation (8QAM) frequency tripling photonic vector millimeter-wave (mm-wave) signal generation method by using a phase modulator (PM) with only amplitude pre-coding. The PM is driven by 2-Gbaud 8QAM-modulated amplitude precoded signal at 25 GHz. Instead of phase pre-coding, we only need to reverse the real part of the signal at the receiver after photo detector (PD). The structure of the transmitter and the structure of the receiver are simple. The frequency tripling scheme is completed by numerical simulation, the output optical spectrum is consistent with the theoretical analysis, and bit-error-ratio (BER) curves indicate that the put forward 75 GHz 8QAM vector signal generation technique has good performance. The BER of 6 Gbit/s 75 GHz 8QAM vector mm-wave signal is below 3.8 × 10 -3 after 12 km optical fiber transmission. For all we know, it is the first time to report on the generation of high-order QAM photonic mm-wave signal with odd times of RF frequency by using a single external modulator.