Programmable RF Receiver Related On-Chip Photonic Processor

Abstract

This study reports and experimentally demonstrates a programmable on-chip photonic processor towards different RF receiver configurations. The Si3N4 processor is built by interconnecting independent subunits such as simple and complex Mach-Zehnder interferometers and Ring resonators. The design, fabrication, and characterization of a dedicated chip are described. As a proof of concept, it can be used as a reconfigurable filter with distinct frequency response. More importantly, a thorough RF receiver related passive processor including out-of-band suppression, carrier-sideband routing, channelization filtering, as well as I-Q mixing prior to an optical detection stage. This is effective proof of a programmable integrated processor encompassing most passive filtering and routing subunits for broadband photonic RF receiver.

Keywords

• Programmable
• $3$ N $4$ nanoprocessor%22%2C%22default_operator%22%3A%22AND%22%7D%7D%7D"> Si<named-content xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:ali="http://www.niso.org/schemas/ali/1.0/" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" content-type="math" xlink:type="simple"> <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$3$</tex-math> </inline-formula> </named-content>N<named-content xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:ali="http://www.niso.org/schemas/ali/1.0/" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" content-type="math" xlink:type="simple"> <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$4$</tex-math> </inline-formula> </named-content> nanoprocessor
• reconfigurable filter
• Mach-Zehnder interferometers
• ring resonators