Modeling for opto-electronic oscillator considering the nonlinearity of microwave amplifier

A new model is proposed to analyze the oscillation power and phase noise characteristics of oscillation signal in the single-loop opto-electronic oscillator (OEO), and then verified by experiments. Compared with previous models, in our model, the nonlinearity of not only the E/O modulator but also the microwave amplifier is included in calculating systematic nonlinearities, so this model can describe OEO more accurately than previous models. Experiments verify the correctness of our model and results show that, compared with previous models, the oscillation power is about 10 dB lower and the minimum single-sideband phase noise after optimization is ∼3 dB higher in our experiments. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 55:715–719, 2013; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI: 10.1002/mop.27428