Comparison of Electronic and Optoelectronic Signal Generation for Wireless THz Communications

We compare electronic and optoelectronic terahertz (THz) signal generation. By mathematical modeling, we compare the noise performance and show that optoelectronic generation has advantages in terms of linearity and spectral purity but suffers from increased phase noise. For electronic transceiver architectures, however, harmonic mixing terms generated in the mixers as well as intermodulation products can become the limiting factors. We experimentally validate our analytical considerations transmitting QPSK, 8QAM, and 16QAM at symbol rates of up to 8 Gbaud over a distance of up to 48m.