A Study of Injection Locking in Optoelectronic Oscillator

Abstract

The random fluctuations of signal phase of an oscillator limit the precision of time and frequency measurements. The noise and long-term stability of the system’s oscillator or clock is of major importance in applications such as optical and wireless communications, high-speed digital electronics, radar, and astronomy. The Optoelectronic Oscillator (OE Oscillator), a new class of time delay oscillator with promise as a low-phase noise source of microwave carriers, was introduced by Steve Yao and Lute Malek in 1996. The OE Oscillator combines into a closed loop an RF photonic link and an RF chain. The RF photonic link consists of a laser, electro-optic modulator, optical fibre delay line, and a photo-receiver that together provide an RF delay. An RF chain consists of one or more amplifiers and a RF resonator that together provide the sustaining amplification and the frequency selectivity necessary for single mode oscillation of the loop. The low loss of optical fibres enables the attainment of delays that correspond to optical fibre lengths of several kilometers. It is the long delay, unattainable in an all electronic implementations that is responsible for the superior phase noise performance of an OE Oscillator. In this thesis the fundamental principles of operation of an OE Oscillator are described and the principal sources of in-loop phase fluctuations that are responsible for phase-noise identified. This lays the ground for an exposition of the mechanism that describes the perturbation of a time delay oscillator by injection into the loop of a carrier that is detuned in frequency from the natural frequency of the oscillator. For sufficiently small detuning the oscillator can become phase locked to the injected carrier. The model presented in the thesis generalises the traditional Yao-Maleki and Leeson model to include all the important features that describe the injection locking dynamics of an OE Oscillator. In particular the common assumptions of single mode oscillation and weak injection are removed. This is important to correctly predict the effect of injection locking on the spurious peaks in the phase noise spectrum corresponding to the side-modes of a time delay oscillator. Simulation results are presented in order to validate the dynamics of the oscillator under injection and analytic results on the lock-in range and phase noise spectrum. A 10 GHz OE Oscillator with a single 5km delay line is used as an example in the simulation illustration.