A photonic chip based frequency discriminator for a high performance microwave photonic link.

We report a high performance phase modulation direct detection microwave photonic link employing a photonic chip as a frequency discriminator. The photonic chip consists of five optical ring resonators (ORRs) which are fully programmable using thermo-optical tuning. In this discriminator a drop-port response of an ORR is cascaded with a through response of another ORR to yield a linear phase modulation (PM) to intensity modulation (IM) conversion. The balanced photonic link employing the PM to IM conversion exhibits high second-order and third-order input intercept points of + 46 dBm and + 36 dBm, respectively, which are simultaneously achieved at one bias point.