Ka-band thin film lithium niobate photonic integrated optoelectronic oscillator

Abstract

Photonics integration of an optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) on a chip is attractive for fabricating low cost, compact, low power consumption, and highly reliable microwave sources, which has been demonstrated recently in silicon on insulator (SOI) and indium phosphide (InP) platforms at X-band around 8 GHz. Here we demonstrate the first integration of OEOs on the thin film lithium niobate (TFLN) platform, which has the advantages of lower V π , no chirp, wider frequency range, and less sensitivity to temperature. We have successfully realized two different OEOs operating at Ka-band, with phase noises even lower than those of the X-band OEOs on SOI and InP platforms. One is a fixed frequency OEO at 30 GHz realized by integrating a Mach–Zehnder modulator (MZM) with an add-drop microring resonator (MRR), and the other is a tunable frequency OEO at 20–35 GHz realized by integrating a phase modulator (PM) with a notch MRR. Our work marks the first step of using TFLN to fabricate integrated OEOs with high frequency, small size, low cost, wide range tunability, and potentially low phase noise.