Abstract

Currently, due to the 6G revolution, applications ranging from communication to sensing are experiencing an increasing and urgent need of software-defined ultra-wideband (UWB) and tunable radio frequency (RF) apparatuses with low size, weight, and power consumption (SWaP). Unfortunately, the coexistence of ultra-wideband and software-defined operation, tunability and low SWaP represents a big issue in the current RF technologies. Recently, photonic techniques have been demonstrated to support achieving the desired features when applied in RF UWB transmitters, introducing extremely wide operation and instantaneous bandwidth, tunable filtering, tunable photonics-based microwave mixing with very high port-to-port isolation, and intrinsic immunity to electromagnetic interferences. Moreover, the recent advances in photonics integration also allow to obtain very compact devices. In this article, to the best of our knowledge, the first example of a complete tunable software-defined RF transmitter with low footprint (i.e., on photonic chip) is presented exceeding the state-of-the-art for the extremely large tunability range of 0.5–50 GHz without any parallelization of narrower-band components and with fast tuning (<200 μs). This first implementation represents a breakthrough in microwave photonics.

Broadly tunable and ultra-highly selective detection of radio frequency signals enabled by a silicon photonic chip

Daniel Onori, Alireza Samani, Benjamin Crockett, David V Plant, and José Azaña
Opt. Express 30(12) 22040-22050 (2022)

Hybrid microwave photonic receiver based on integrated tunable bandpass filters

Jiachen Li, Sigang Yang, Hongwei Chen, and Minghua Chen
Opt. Express 29(7) 11084-11093 (2021)

Performance evaluation of photonic UWB generation based on silicon MZM

Haifeng Shao, Weiwei Chen, Yong Zhao, Hao Chi, Jianyi Yang, and Xiaoqing Jiang
Opt. Express 20(7) 7398-7403 (2012)

Fully integrated hybrid microwave photonic receiver

Jiachen Li, Sigang Yang, Hongwei Chen, Xingjun Wang, Minghua Chen, and Weiwen Zou
Photon. Res. 10(6) 1472-1483 (2022)

Integrated microwave photonic filters

Yang Liu, Amol Choudhary, David Marpaung, and Benjamin J. Eggleton
Adv. Opt. Photon. 12(2) 485-555 (2020)