On-chip pulse shaper for optical and microwave arbitrary waveform generation

Abstract

Arbitrary waveform generation attracts a lot of interests in recent years because of its widely applications in many different fields. We have proposed and experimentally demonstrate two on-chip pulse shaper schemes for microwave and optical arbitrary waveform generation. These schemes are all fabricated on the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) chips for its compactness and capability to integrate with electronics. The two schemes based on finite impulse response (FIR). By thermally controlling the amplitude and phase of each path, we can obtain different applications of arbitrary waveform generation. The pulse shaper of optical arbitrary waveform generation can be a programmable filter with central wavelength tunable, bandwidth tunable and passband shape variable functions, and a high-order differentiator which may obtain the first-order, second-order and third-order differentiations likewise. It can also implement several typical optical waveforms, such as the square waveform, triangular waveform, sawtooth waveform and Gaussian waveform. The pulse shaper for microwave arbitrary waveform generation can obtain several microwave waveforms with the central frequency at 125GHz. Comparing with the proposed schemes by frequency shaping and frequency-to-time mapping, our schemes do not require any spectral dispersers or large dispersion mediums. And all units in our schemes are broad-band devices, so there is no bandwidth limitation in our schemes.