Si 3N 4-Based Integrated Optical Analog Signal Processor and Its Application in RF Photonic Frontend

Digital signal processing has achieved great success in the field of signal processing over the past several decades. However, as the bandwidth requirement increases, the power consumption and effective number of bits (ENOB) of the analog-to-digital convertor (ADC) have become bottlenecks. One solution is returning to analog and applying microwave photonic technologies, which shows potential for multiband signal processing. In this paper, a programmable integrated analog photonic signal processor based on cascaded Mach–Zehnder interferometers (MZIs) and a channelized filter has been proposed. Different shapes of the signal processor can be acquired for different applications. The highest processing resolution is 143 MHz, and the processing range of the signal processor can be higher than 112.5 GHz. An application of the signal processor for the signal extraction in a radio frequency (RF) photonic frontend operating from L-band to K-band is presented.