High-Performance Chip-Assisted Microwave Photonic Functionalities

Integrated microwave photonics (IMWP) is poised to release the bottlenecks in modern wireless communication systems. The manipulation of microwave signals in the optical domain offers key advantages of broad bandwidth, reconfiguration, and fast tuning speeds. However, in current IMWP devices, there are some challenges that need to be overcome. These include the ~1 GHz frequency resolution of the IMWP functionalities, limited by the on-chip photonic functional devices' performance, which has prompted research into on-chip stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) to achieve sub-30 MHz signal processing capabilities. Equally important, the performance metrics including the noise figure, dynamic range, and the insertion loss, need to be improved before commercial deployment. While SBS offers significant advantages of high resolution and reconfigurability, there is potential for improved signal-to-noise ratios and, therefore, to obtain a low noise figure. In this letter, we present an overview of recent approaches for achieving high-performance IMWP functionalities, including SBS-induced noise management and the optimized MWP link configurations.