Silicon Photonics for Microwave Photonics Applications

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Microwave photonics is an area that studies the interaction between microwave and optical waves for the generation, processing, control and distribution of microwave signals by means of photonics,which can find numerous applications such as broadband wireless communications, radar, sensors, imaging, and modern instrumentation. The key motivation of using photonics for microwave applications is the large bandwidth and low loss offered by photonics, which makes the implementation of certain important functions possible while in the electrical domain the same functions may not be realizable or the systems become extremely complicated and costly. Different microwave photonics systems have been proposed and demonstrated in the past few years. However, these systems were implemented mainly based on discrete photonic and microwave components, which make the systems bulky, heavy and costly with relatively poorer performance. On the other hand, there is an increasing interest in the last few years in integrating photonic devices on silicon chips, an area called silicon photonics. Compared to conventional photonic devices based on III-V semiconductors, silicon photonics is a technique that allows optical devices to be made economically using standard and well-developed semiconductor fabrication techniques. Significant breakthroughs have been made in the last few years in implementing both passive and active optical devices on a silicon substrate, such as optical waveguides, optical filters, add-drop multiplexers, modulators, and photodetectors. However, very few demonstrations have been reported to implement microwave photonics devices and systems based on silicon photonics. The motivation of the proposed research is to use the well-established silicon integration technologies to fabricate microwave photonic devices and systems on a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) substrate, to demonstrate different microwave photonics functionalities with significantly improved system performance.