Comparison between balanced and unbalanced precoding technique in high-order QAM vector mm-wave signal generation based on intensity modulator with photonic frequency doubling

We experimentally investigate high-order quadrature-amplitudemodulation (QAM) vector millimeter-wave (mm-wave) signal generation based on intensity modulator (IM) with photonic frequcney doubling and precoding in this paper. In order to obtain an ordinary QAM modulated radio-frequency (RF) signal after the square-law detection of the photodiode, amplitude and phase precoding technique should be employed. In this paper, we experimentally investigate the generation of 1∼4 Gbaud vector mm-wave signal with the modulation formats of 8QAM and 16QAM at the carrier frequency of 40 GHz, and study the bit-error-rate (BER) performance of both balanced precoding scheme and unbalanced precoding scheme adopting high-order QAM modulation.