A novel scheme to suppress the third-order intermodulation distortion based on dual-parallel Mach–Zehnder modulator

A scheme to enlarge the spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) of the microwave photonic link is proposed based on a dual-parallel Mach–Zehnder modulator (DPMZM). By properly adjusting the phase of the RF signals and the bias voltages of the DPMZM, the second-order spurious components in the optical carrier band (OCB) of the two sub-MZMs can be canceled out completely, and the third-order and fifth-order spurious components in the first-order upper sideband (1-USB) produced by one sub-MZM have equal amplitude but \(180{^{\circ }}\) phase difference with the other sub-MZM. Therefore, as the two optical beams are combined at the output of the DPMZM and the OCB and the 1-USB are abstracted by a bandpass filter to generate the transmitted signal, all the major optical spurious components that contribute to the third-order intermodulation distortion (IMD3) are canceled out. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed scheme, without digital linearization and other optical processor, can suppress IMD3 approximately 30 dB and improve the SFDR by \(18~\hbox {dB}\,\hbox {Hz}^{2/3}\) compared with the conventional quadrature biased MZM system.