Dedication To My parents

A self-homodyne photonic receiver for transmitted carrier wireless links isdemonstrated. The key innovations in this photonic RF-receiver are the design andimplementation of a resonant LiNbO3 microdisk electro-optic modulator and novelRF down-conversion techniques that exploit the sensitivity of the microdisk forefficient RF down-conversion in the optical domain. By careful RF and opticaldesign, simultaneous photonic and RF resonance is achieved in a LiNbO3 microdiskmodulator resulting in a sensitivity of -80 dBm at 14.6 GHz.Two photonic RF down-conversion techniques are proposed to extract the basebandinformation from a RF signal that has a transmitted carrier modulation format. In thefirst approach we use an optical filter to modify the optical output spectrum of themicrodisk modulator. Photodetection of the subsequent optical signal generates thebaseband photocurrent. In the second technique the RF carrier and sidebands aremixed through nonlinear optical modulation in the microdisk and the down-converted signal is detected using a photodetector. In both cases the bandwidth ofthe photodetector and electronic circuitry are limited to that of the baseband signal.Receiver operation is demonstrated by demodulating up to 100 Mb/s digital datafrom a 14.6 GHz RF carrier frequency. Power efficiency, small volume, light weightand elimination of high-speed electronic components are the main specifications ofthe photonic RF-receiver that make it useful for applications like wireless LANs,fiber-feed backbone networks or video distribution systems.