Performance improvement of microwave photonic frequency down-conversion link is investigated both in simulation and experiment. To achieve maximum signal-to-noise ratio, a dual-drive Mach-Zehnder modulator (DDMZM) biased at the minimum transmission point and an erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) are employed to boost the power of the first-order modulation sidebands. The power spectrum density of the output noise is limited by the thermal noise and relative intensity noise (RIN) with low and high gain of EDFA, respectively. Correspondingly, the output noise figure (NF) decreases rapidly in the case of a thermal-noise-dominant noise floor and remains stable in RIN-dominant noise floor situations. When the local oscillation (LO) and the radio frequency (RF) signal powers are set to be 10 dBm and the input optical power before photodetector (PD) is amplified to be 20 dBm, an intermediate frequency signal with a high power of 10.8 dBm is obtained. When LO/RF power is set to be 0 dBm and the amplified optical power entering the PD is 16 dBm, the NF of the proposed link is measured as 31.5 dB, which is 14 dB lower than the link without EDFA, while the conversion gain has improved to 12 dB with an increase of 57.2 dB. Finally, the spurious-free dynamic range of the link is measured as 113.3 dB·Hz 2/3 when the power of the LO signal is 0 dBm and the gain of EDFA is 18 dB.
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