Local oscillator free all optical OOK signal frequency up conversion enabled by injection locking of Fabry–Pérot laser

Abstract We demonstrate an all optical up-conversion system by injecting low bitrates baseband OOK signal directly into a conventional Fabry–Perot laser diode (FP-LD). Radio frequency (RF) carrier is generated due to period-one (P1) oscillation state of nonlinear dynamics system (NDS) in the FP-LD with the injection of external optical signal. No extra high speed and expensive local oscillator is required for the up-conversion. Based on this approach, we experimentally achieved the up-conversion of 2 Gbps RZ-OOK baseband signal to 12 GHz and 14.28 GHz RF carriers, and 2.5 Gbps NRZ-OOK baseband signal to 10 GHz, 18.2 GHz and 20.88 GHz RF carriers respectively. The obtained 20.88 GHz RF carriers have a signal to side mode suppression ratio of 29 dB, and phase noise of −84.2 dBc/Hz@10 kHz.