|
Dear Technical Committee,
Prof. Josè Azaña and I have gladly accepted the invitation by Dr. Pavel Cheben to present an Invited Talk at the Integrated Optics: Design, Devices, Systems and Applications of the SPIE Optics and Optoelectronics Symposium.
Best regards,
Daniel Onori
Abstract:
The key goal for next-generation RF signal transceivers for communication, radar, and surveillance systems is a chip-scale implementation able to provide the highest performance in terms of total frequency range of operation (i.e., from 0.5 to 40 GHz and beyond), dynamic range, and linearity. Unfortunately, microwave technology is revealing unable to achieve the target performance with the desired level of compactness. In fact, its intrinsic bandwidth constraints impose the need of components that prevent a chip-scale integration, such as RF filter banks and multiple crystal oscillators. The generation and detection of RF signals through photonic coherent architectures results extremely attractive due to the promising wide bandwidth and large tunability that could be achieved with these technologies. When implemented in integrated-waveguide formats, photonic devices also present significantly reduced footprint with respect to conventional RF components. However, in order to reduce the interference noise introduced by optical sources exploited in the schemes, current solutions rely on technologies or components that prevent a monolithic on-chip integration. For instance, self-heterodyning schemes use tunable RF synthesizers for the electro-optical generation of the required coherent optical tones, while injection locking techniques, used to cancel the interference noise between the optical sources, stem from optical circulators, that cannot be integrated on chip. In this talk, we will review recent work on a novel noise cancelling architecture used to suppress the interference noise introduced by the lasers that feed the system and preserve the integrity of the processed signals during the operation. The solution overcomes the mentioned main drawbacks of the previously proposed scheme, enabling the realization of RF transceivers with high-performance and reduced footprint. Considering the commercial and integration potential of silicon photonics technology, we will discuss the advantages of a chip-scale implementation of this new design in terms of performance, reliability, and cost.
|
