Cross-correlation technology for decreasing the noise figure of microwave photonic link

The cross-correlation technology is applied to decrease the noise figure of microwave photonic link(MPL) for the first time in this paper. Firstly, both effects of the intensity of the laser and the bias voltage of the EOM on the noise figure of MPL are analyzed and optimized. Then, a cascaded low-noise amplifier is added in front of MPL for lower noise figure. Finally, the double laser - double detector structure based on cross-correlation technology is used to offset different kinds of uncorrelated noise in the link and experiments show that the noise figure is further reduced by 3 dB.