A Wideband Spread Spectrum Microwave Photonic Transceiver Architecture with Coherent Dual Carriers and Superheterodyne Down Conversion

In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a novel microwave photonics architecture consisting of a transmitter and a receiver, designed for spread spectrum communication. The transmitter is capable of spreading and up-converting a baseband signal to a wideband spread spectrum signal at a frequency of 10 GHz. On the other hand, the receiver can despread and down-convert the wideband spread spectrum signal back to the baseband signal. The architecture exhibits remarkable capabilities in handling large instantaneous bandwidth signals across a wide operating band, making it suitable for various application scenarios. Additionally, our experimental results highlight the architecture's excellent performance in image suppression (up to 56 dB) and dynamic range (SFDR3: 127.2 $\text{dB}\cdot \text{Hz}^{2/3})$ .