Silicon Integrated Subharmonic Mixer on a Photonic-Crystal Platform

Abstract

This article presents a planar silicon integrated subharmonic mixer on top of a photonic-crystal (PC) platform. The local oscillator power is injected through a 2-D PC slab to a resonant cavity that effectively couples the signal to a planar bow-tie antenna. The same antenna, which is printed on the top of the PC cavity, contains an antiparallel Schottky diode pair, which performs the downconversion. The proposed design is a simple, easy-to-integrate, low-cost, low-profile device. Moreover, the described fabrication process is compatible with active component integration. The performance of the design has been experimentally demonstrated showing good agreement with the simulation and is comparable with the state of the art of planar mixers. The work presented here is based on concepts and technologies from electronics and photonics domains and may be a good starting point for the creation of new devices, allowing the integration and upgrading of existing techniques from both fields.