Abstract
In this work, the design of an integrated radiometer frontend for earth observation applications on satellites is presented. By means of the efficient electro-optic modulation of a laser pump with the observed millimeter-wave signal followed by the detection of the generated optical sideband, a room-temperature low-noise receiver frontend alternative to conventional Low Noise Amplifiers (LNAs) or Schottky mixers is proposed. Efficient millimeter-wave to 1550 nm upconversion is realized via a nonlinear optical process in a triply resonant high-Q Lithium Niobate (LN) Whispering Gallery Mode (WGM) resonator. By engineering a micromachined millimeter-wave cavity that maximizes the overlap with the optical modes while guaranteeing phase matching, the system has a predicted normalized photon-conversion efficiency per pump power, surpassing the state-of-the-art by around three orders of magnitude at millimeter-wave frequencies. A piezo-driven millimeter-wave tuning mechanism is designed to compensate for the fabrication and assembly tolerances and reduces the complexity of the manufacturing process.
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