Advanced Radio Frequency Photonic Integrated Circuits

This proposal will explore the development of photonic integrated circuits (PICs) in multiple material systems: silicon, silicon-nitride, and TFLN and will choose the right material system for the application. As an example, low frequency control systems will likely be implemented in a silicon PIC, whereas purely passive routing and splitting may be done in silicon-nitride (as it offers lower propagation loss). If high sensitivity and large operational bandwidth are required, the system may be realized in TFLN. Fortunately, PSI has significant experience in all of these material systems. In so doing, the developed PIC technology will yield a new generation of RF-Photonic materials, devices, and system-level technologies that will provide revolutionary new capabilities for the warfighter. In addition, particular emphasis will be to ensure that modern PIC systems also account for legacy systems, i.e., they must maintain their ability to work in the low region of the spectrum, while simultaneously operating in the high region of the spectrum. This is becoming particularly important given the emergence of commercial mmW systems, which will work well into the mmW regime, and soon to extend up through W-band, i.e., 110 GHz. This being the case, it is safe to say that no RF system is currently capable of such wide operational bandwidth. Moreover, it is hard to imagine a single RF system ever being capable of such operation. It is for this reason that PSI has developed a range of RF-Photonic technologies on both the device and systems level that are specifically designed to address this need. The proposed effort leverages over $15M in past and current DoD applied research programs, which have already proven most of the critical concepts. In this proposal, we lay out a plan to develop a RF phased array imaging system centered around a PIC capable of processing high bandwidth RF signals in the optical domain.