Broadband blind source separation by integrated photonics

Blind source separation (BSS) becomes popularly useful with the need for increased bandwidth utilization. However, the traditional radio-frequency (RF) electronics hardly offer the BSS the demanded frequency agility because of the inherent bandwidth limitation. The emerging integrated photonics, fortunately, can be an efficacious alternative. Here, we demonstrate a photonic BSS approach based on the microring (MRR) weightbank that achieves blind source separation of up to 13.8 GHz bandwidth. In addition, by implementing an improved MRR control method with an accuracy of up to 8.5 bits, the reduced errors give confidence in solving BSS problems with a large ill-condition number.