Integrated RF-photonic beamforming circuit using high-contrast grating delay-line waveguides

Stephen R. Anderson; Amir Begović; Lingjun Jiang; Alexander Chen; Zhaoran Rena Huang; Weimin Zhou

doi:10.1117/12.2547398

26 February 2020 Integrated RF-photonic beamforming circuit using high-contrast grating delay-line waveguides

Stephen R. Anderson, Amir Begović, Lingjun Jiang, Alexander Chen, Zhaoran Rena Huang, Weimin Zhou

Proceedings Volume 11290, High Contrast Metastructures IX; 112900J (2020) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2547398
Event: SPIE OPTO, 2020, San Francisco, California, United States

Abstract

An RF-Photonic phased array antenna beamformer was previously demonstrated using cascaded fiber Bragg gratings with 1 x 2 couplers for true-time-delay beamforming. This work's focus is to design, build, and test an integrated Si-photonic beamforming circuit to replace the fiber-optics system, allowing for chip-scale beamformers with low size, weight, power, and cost. Several metastructure waveguides were designed to provide a strong slowlight effect near their transmission band edge. By tuning the wavelength near the band edge, tunable optical truetime delay is achieved. We report the design, simulation, fabrication and test of these high-contrast metastructure waveguides to provide group velocity variation against wavelength near the band-edge. Wavelength-tunable delay was verified using both an interferometric approach using an integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometer, and using a direct measurement of the true-time delay of an RF signal modulated onto a C-band optical carrier. We have also designed an integrated photonic beamforming circuit for a small array, including photodetectors, fabricated by AIM Photonics. Experimental test results for those integrated photonic circuits will be discussed. We will continue to improve our integrated photonic circuit to pursue larger array implementation. The goal is to further integrate this photonic circuit with an RF phase array antenna and demonstrate the scan of an RF beam by optical control.

Conference Presentation

Citation Download Citation

Stephen R. Anderson, Amir Begović, Lingjun Jiang, Alexander Chen, Zhaoran Rena Huang, and Weimin Zhou "Integrated RF-photonic beamforming circuit using high-contrast grating delay-line waveguides", Proc. SPIE 11290, High Contrast Metastructures IX, 112900J (26 February 2020); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2547398

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