INTERGATED PHOTONIC-ASSISTED ELECTRONICS FOR PHASED ARRAY BEAMFORMING AND DELAY CONTROL
Degree type
Graduate group
Discipline
Subject
Integrated circuits
millimeter-wave CMOS circuits
Optoelectronics
Photonic integrated circuits
Photonics
Funder
Grant number
License
Copyright date
Distributor
Related resources
Author
Contributor
Abstract
In recent years, electronic-photonic co-design and co-integration has emerged as a disruptive technology to augment the power of integrated circuits and deliver enhanced chip scale solutions for a variety of applications ranging from communication and sensing to imaging and computation. Coupled with the versatility of electronics, integrated photonic techniques may be employed to assist in the generation, distribution and or processing of electrical signals. Benefitting from the advancements in CMOS-compatible silicon photonics, this dissertation presents system architectures, design details, analysis, and measurement results for three integrated photonic-assisted electronic systems. The first system presented is a delay controlled optoelectronic oscillator comprised of an integrated, rapidly tunable, optical delay line. The oscillator can be continuously tuned from 594MHz to 634MHz and possesses a relatively flat modulation response at high frequencies accommodating wideband fast frequency chirp generation pertinent to frequency modulated continuous-wave radar systems and imagers. The integrated photonic delay line, forming the core block of the oscillator, has an instantaneous bandwidth of 5GHz and can be used to provide continuous delays up to 100ps. Such a delay line may also be used for temporal manipulation of electrical signals with applications in photonic beamformers and high-speed equalization in photonic links. The second system presented is an integrated phased array transmitter applicable for low-power, compact radio heads in fiber to mm-wave fronthaul links. The implemented 2x8 integrated transmitter utilizes optical heterodyning within an electronically controlled photonic network for mm-wave generation, beamforming, and steering. A photonic matrix phase adjustment architecture reduces the required number of phase-shift elements. The transmitter has a steering range of about 40° and can operate from 24-29GHz. With an optical power of 55mW and without using any active mm-wave electronics, an EIRP of 5dBm is achieved. Data streams with bitrates as high as 2.5Gb/s are transmitted over 3.6km of optical fiber, directly placed on an mm-wave carrier, and wirelessly transmitted attaining bit-error rates better than 10e-11. The third system presented is a mm-wave phased array transmitter that uses free-space optics and integrated photonics for the distribution of a 28GHz RF signal. Electronic-photonic transmitter chips are tiled in a 2x2 array and placed on a printed circuit board eliminating lossy board-level mm-wave distribution networks and complex packaging requirements such as multi-layer laminates or interposers. With this scheme, a low-cost phased array capable of scanning in azimuth and elevation with more than 60° steering range is developed and demonstrated.