Si
3
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-Based Integrated Optical Analog
Signal Processor and Its Application in
RF Photonic Frontend
Hongchen Yu,
1,2
Student Member, IEEE, Minghua Chen,
1,2
Member, IEEE,
Qiang Guo,
1,2
Marcel Hoekman,
3
Hongwei Chen,
1,2
Member, IEEE,
Arne Leinse,
3
Rene G. Heideman,
3
Richard Mateman,
3
Sigang Yang,
1,2
Member, IEEE, and Shizhong Xie,
1,2
Senior Member, IEEE
1
Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology, Beijing 100084, China
2
Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
3
LioniX, 7500 AL Enschede, The Netherlands
DOI: 10.1109/JPHOT.2015.2471084
1943-0655 Ó 2015 IEEE. Translations and content mining are permitted for academic research only.
Personal use is also permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
Manuscript received June 3, 2015; revised August 17, 2015; accepted August 18, 2015. Date of publi-
cation August 20, 2015; date of current version September 2, 2015. This work was supported in part by
the National Program on Key Basic Research Project (973) under Contract 2012CB315703; by the Na-
tional Science Foundation of China under Contract 61335002, Contract 61120106001, Contract
61271134, Contract 61322113; by the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University under
Grant NCET-10-0520; and by the Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program. Corre-
sponding author: M. Chen (e-mail: chenmh@tsinghua.edu.cn).
Abstract: Digital signal processing has achieved great success in the field of signal
processing over the p ast several decades. However, as the bandwidth requirement in-
creases, the p ower consumption and effective number of bits (ENOB) of the analog-
to-digital convertor (ADC) have become bottlenecks. One solution is returning to analog
and applying microwave photonic technologies, which shows potenti al for multiband
signal processing. In this paper, a programmable integrated analog photonic signal pro-
cessor based on cascaded Mach–Zehnder interferometers (MZIs) and a channelized fil-
ter has been proposed. Different shapes of the signal processor can be acquired for
different applications. The highest processing resolution is 1 43 MHz, and the process-
ing range of the signal processor can be higher than 112.5 GHz. An application of the
signal processor for the signal extraction in a ra dio frequency (RF) photonic f rontend
operating from L-band to K-band is presented.
Index Terms: Integrated optics devices, radio frequency (RF) photonics, analog optical
signal processing.
1. Introduction
Signal p rocessing has become increasingly important for its potential applications in science and
engineering, which generally contains two subfields: analog signal processing and digital signal
processing. Since the development of digital signal processing in the 1960s, signal processing in
the field of radio frequency (RF) wireless communication [1], [2] or optical communication [3], [4]
has been mostly transformed from the analog to digital domain. This allows for many advantages
like for instance flexible programmable signal processing, high stability and interference toler-
ance. In particular, software radio (SR) technologies have been more inspired to researchers in
RF receivers since 1990s for their potential advantages of flexibility and reconfiguration [5]–[7].
Vol. 7, No. 5, October 2015 5501009
IEEE Photonics Journal Integrated Optical Analog Signal Processor
