E-band photonic transmitter with tapered slot antenna for RoF applications

A new concept for photonic transmitter (PT) is presented for radio-over-fiber (RoF) wireless communication in E-band frequencies. The device features a high power and high frequency photodiode (PD) integrated with a wideband and high gain tapered slot antenna with a built-in biasing network on an RF laminate. Presented approach allows for simpler and low loss optoelectronic integration. The full-wave simulations show that for the optimised PT the PD-to-antenna insertion loss is as low as 0.4dB and a gain of 14.5dBi. This allows the realisation of an efficient RoF front-end with low footprint that can be extended to mmWave phased-array systems.