RF Photonics: An Optical Microcombs’ Perspective

By Jiayang Wu, Xingyuan Xu, Thach G. Nguyen, Sai T. Chu, Brent E. Little, Roberto Morandotti, Arnan Mitchell, David J. Moss. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics, 2018

330 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Over the past decade, optical frequency combs generated by high-Q microresonators, or optical microcombs, which feature compact device footprints, low power consumption, and high repetition rates in broad optical bandwidths, have led to a revolution in a wide range of fields including metrology, telecommunications, radio frequency (RF) photonics, spectroscopy, sensing, and quantum optics. Among these, an application that has attracted great interest is the use of optical microcombs for RF photonics, where they offer enhanced functionalities as well as reduced size and power consumption over other approaches. This paper reviews the recent advances in this emerging field. We provide an overview of the main achievements that have been obtained to date, and highlight the strong potential of optical microcombs for RF photonics applications. We also discuss some of the open challenges and limitations that need to be addressed for practical applications.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/20b1f8d89d46fbbfa18474ed9c78e13ddfeef24a

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Citations in the corpus

Photonic RF Phase-Encoded Signal Generation With a Microcomb Source (2020, background): “Photonic techniques have significant potential to overcome the limitations of their electronic counterparts [4] due to their intrinsically broad bandwidth, immunity from electromagnetic interference, and low propagation loss [5-11].”
Microcomb-Based Photonic RF Signal Processing (2019, background): “Based on these advantages, a wide range of RF applications have been demonstrated, such as optical true time delays [23]–[25], transversal filters [25]–[27], signal processors [28], [29], channelizers [30], [31] and others [32]–[34].”
11 TOPS photonic convolutional accelerator for optical neural networks (2021, methodology): “,30,32 ), with the 90 wavelengths occupying 36 nm across the C-band (see Extended Data Fig.”
Broadband Photonic RF Channelizer With 92 Channels Based on a Soliton Crystal Microcomb (2020, background): “they offer a large number of coherent wavelength channels in a mm2-size footprint, and have enabled a wide range of RF devices and applications [41], [42], such as RF true time delays [43], [44], transversal signal processors [45]–[50], frequency conversion [51], phase-encoded signal generators [52]”
Photonic RF and microwave filters based on 49 GHz and 200 GHz Kerr microcombs (2020, methodology): “cated using CMOS compatible fabrication processes, with Q factors of over 1.2 million and radii of ~592 μm and ~135 μm, corresponding to FSRs of ~0.4 nm (~49 GHz) and ~1.6 nm (~200 GHz), respectively [118, 127]. The MRRs used to generate the Kerr optical micro-combs are shown in Figure 1a for the 20”
Photonic RF Arbitrary Waveform Generator Based on a Soliton Crystal Micro-Comb Source (2020, background): “RF transversal filtering is a powerful approach to RF signal processing that is particularly well suited to multiwavelength optical sources [24].”