Abstract
Multitude applications of photonic devices and technologies for the generation and manipulation of arbitrary and random microwave waveforms, at unprecedented processing speeds, have been proposed in the literature over the past three decades. This class of photonic applications for microwave engineering is known as microwave photonics (MWP). The vast capabilities of MWP have allowed the realization of key functionalities which are either highly complex or simply not possible in the microwave domain alone. Recently, this growing field has adopted the integrated photonics technologies to develop microwave photonic systems with enhanced robustness as well as with a significant reduction of size, cost, weight, and power consumption. In particular, silicon photonics technology is of great interest for this aim as it offers outstanding possibilities for integration of highly-complex active and passive photonic devices, permitting monolithic integration of MWP with high-speed silicon electronics. In this article, we present a review of recent work on MWP functions developed on the silicon platform. We particularly focus on newly reported designs for signal modulation, arbitrary waveform generation, filtering, true-time delay, phase shifting, beam steering, and frequency measurement.
Highlights
Microwave photonics (MWP) is a multidisciplinary research discipline which bridges the photonics and microwave engineering worlds and investigates the handling of analog microwave signals using photonic devices and technologies for microwave applications, most prominently in telecommunications and sensing systems [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
We present a comprehensive review of the recent developments made since 2014 to date on the application of silicon photonic technology for MWP functions, i.e., the part of the IMWP
We review here three different implementations reported in the literature recently: a PN junction loaded microdisk cavity offering electrical tunability of group delay suffering from lower bandwidth [93], an interesting demonstration involving subwavelength grating (SWG) waveguide which does not suffer from bandwidth limitations [94], and a continuously tunable delay line using a cascade of switches and dual rings [95]
Summary
Microwave photonics (MWP) is a multidisciplinary research discipline which bridges the photonics and microwave engineering worlds and investigates the handling of analog microwave signals using photonic devices and technologies for microwave applications, most prominently in telecommunications and sensing systems (the term microwave is used freely throughout the literature to designate either RF, microwave, or millimeter-wave signals) [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. Several groups of researchers around the world have deployed the so-called hybrid integration technique, i.e., the integration of III-V components on silicon platforms, to merge direct-bandgap materials with low-loss silicon active and passive photonic components [65,66,67,68,69] Using this strategy, processed III–V lasers, gain chips, or even PDs can be optically connected readily to silicon photonic circuits, where the III–V device may be mounted either on top of the silicon substrate or next to it [69]. Much research during this period has been focused towards realizing IMWP functions at the system level using different techniques and improving figures of merit of MWP devices at the component level. We directly overview the results of the recent work on the topic and avoid the replication of the most basic material provided in previous reviews [3], e.g., fundamentals of MWP
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