Idler-free microwave photonic mixer integrated with a widely tunable and highly selective microwave photonic filter.

A novel structure consisting of an idler-free microwave photonic mixer integrated with a widely tunable and highly selective microwave photonic filter is presented, which is comprised of a spectrum-sliced broadband optical source, a dual-parallel Mach-Zehnder modulator (DPMZM), and a spatial light amplitude and phase processor (SLAPP). By adjusting the optical phase shift in the DPMZM, the dispersion-induced mixing power fading can be eliminated. By applying a phase processor with the SLAPP, the distortion of the mixing filter brought upon by third-order dispersion is also compensated. Experiments are performed and show that the up/down-conversion signal has a clean spectrum and the mixing filter can be tuned from 12 to 20 GHz without any change to the passband shape. The out-of-band suppression ratio of the mixing filter is more than 40 dB, and the 3 dB bandwidth is 140 MHz.