Digital-photonic synthesis of ultra-low noise tunable signals from RF to 100 GHz

The demand for higher data rates and better synchronization in communication and navigation systems necessitates the development of new wideband and tunable sources with noise performance exceeding that provided by traditional oscillators and synthesizers. Precision synthesis is paramount for providing frequency references and timing in a broad range of applications including next-generation telecommunications, high precision measurement, and radar and sensing. Here we describe a digital-photonic synthesizer (DPS) based on optical frequency division that enables the generation of widely tunable signals from near DC to 100 GHz with a fractional frequency instability of 1 part in 10^15. The spectral purity of the DPS derived signals represents an improvement in close-to-carrier noise performance over the current state-of-the-art of nearly 7 orders of magnitude in the W-band (100 GHz), and up to 5 orders of magnitude in the X-band (10 GHz).