Researchers develop world-leading microwave photonics chip for high-speed signal processing

A research team led by Professor Wang Cheng from the Department of Electrical Engineering (EE) at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) has developed a world-leading microwave photonic chip that can use optics to perform ultra-fast analog electronic signal processing and calculations. .

The chip is 1,000 times faster and consumes less power than traditional electronic processors, and has a wide range of applications covering 5/6G wireless communication systems, high-resolution radar systems, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and image/video processing. .

The team’s findings are Nature In a paper titled “Integrated Lithium Niobate Microwave Photoprocessing Engine.” This is a joint research with the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).

The rapid expansion of wireless networks, the Internet of Things, and cloud-based services is placing significant demands on the underlying radio frequency systems. Microwave photonics (MWP) technology, which uses optical components to generate, transmit, and manipulate microwave signals, provides an effective solution to these challenges. However, integrated MWP systems have struggled to simultaneously achieve ultra-fast analog signal processing with chip-scale integration, high fidelity, and low power consumption.

“To address these challenges, our team developed an MWP system that combines ultrafast electro-optical (EO) conversion with low-loss, multifunctional signal processing on a single integrated chip. This has not been achieved before,” Professor Wang explained.

Such performance is achieved through an integrated MWP processing engine based on a thin-film lithium niobate (LN) platform that can perform versatile processing of analog signals and computational tasks.

“This chip can perform high-speed analog calculations with an ultra-wide processing bandwidth of 67 GHz and excellent calculation accuracy,” said Dr. Feng Hanke. EE student and first author of the paper.

The team has been dedicated to researching integrated LN photonic platforms for several years. In 2018, colleagues at Harvard University and Nokia Bell Laboratories developed the world’s first CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) compatible integrated electro-optic modulator on the LN platform, marking a breakthrough in current research. built a foundation. LN has been called the “silicon of photonics” because of its importance to photonics, comparable to silicon in microelectronics.

Their work opens up a new research field called LN microwave photonics, enabling microwave photonics chips with compact size, high signal fidelity, and low latency. It also represents a chip-scale analog electronic processing and computing engine.