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Aug 18, 2015 - insertion loss, and V π И 4 V. This was biased at quadrature and was ..... L. Nguyen and D. Hunter, “A photonic technique for microwave frequency ... V. Ta'eed, D. Moss, B. Eggleton, D. Freeman, S. Madden, M. Samoc, B.
Research Article

Vol. 2, No. 8 / August 2015 / Optica

751

Low-error and broadband microwave frequency measurement in a silicon chip MATTIA PAGANI,1 BLAIR MORRISON,1 YANBING ZHANG,1 ALVARO CASAS-BEDOYA,1 TIMO AALTO,2 MIKKO HARJANNE,2 MARKKU KAPULAINEN,2 BENJAMIN J. EGGLETON,1 AND DAVID MARPAUNG1,* 1

Center for Ultrahigh Bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS), The Institute of Photonics and Optical Sciences (IPOS), School of Physics, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia 2 VTT Technical Research Center of Finland, Espoo 02040, Finland *Corresponding author: [email protected] Received 26 May 2015; revised 29 July 2015; accepted 29 July 2015 (Doc. ID 241693); published 18 August 2015

Instantaneous frequency measurement (IFM) of microwave signals is a fundamental functionality for applications ranging from electronic warfare to biomedical technology. Photonic techniques, and nonlinear optical interactions in particular, have the potential to broaden the frequency measurement range beyond the limits of electronic IFM systems. The key lies in efficiently harnessing optical mixing in an integrated nonlinear platform, with low losses. In this work, we exploit the low loss of a 35 cm long, thick silicon waveguide to efficiently harness Kerr nonlinearity and demonstrate, to the best of our knowledge, the first on-chip four-wave mixing-based IFM system. We achieve a large, 40 GHz measurement bandwidth and a record-low measurement error. Finally, we discuss the future prospect of integrating the whole IFM system on a silicon chip to enable the first reconfigurable, broadband IFM receiver with low latency. © 2015 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: (060.5625) Radio frequency photonics; (190.4390) Nonlinear optics, integrated optics; (190.4380) Nonlinear optics, four-wave mixing. http://dx.doi.org/10.1364/OPTICA.2.000751

1. INTRODUCTION The ability to measure the frequency of an unknown radio frequency (RF) or microwave signal, without relying on expensive spectrum analyzers and mixers, is a basic requirement for the development and testing of wireless systems. In particular, the ability to do so in real-time (