ESE PhD Thesis Defense: “Integrated photonic-assisted electronics for phased array beamforming and delay control”

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 exhibits 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 second system presented is a photonic assisted integrated phased array transmitter applicable for low-power, compact radio heads in fiber to mm-wave fronthaul links. Without the use of any mm-wave active components, 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 10^-11. The third system presented is a mm-wave phased array transmitter utilizing free-space optics and integrated photonics for the distribution of a 28GHz RF signal eliminating lossy board-level mm-wave distribution networks and complex packaging requirements. 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.