Advanced Radio Frequency Photonic Integrated Circuits

This proposal will focus on building and demonstrating photonic integrated circuits (PICs) to support optical processing of RF signals in multi-channel transmit and receive phased array systems. The PICs will be incorporated into system-level demonstrations of receiving phased arrays that can process a wide range of RF frequencies (up to at least 40 GHz) with wide instantaneous bandwidths (up to 10 GHz). The optical processing PICs will mainly be realized in a silicon photonic platform with additional exploration and demonstration of hybrid or heterogenous integration with other critical material systems. 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.