Weak Radio-Frequency Signal Detection Based on Piezo-Opto-Electro-Mechanical System: Architecture Design and Sensitivity Prediction

We propose a novel radio-frequency (RF) receiving architecture based on the microelectromechanical system (MEMS) and optical coherent detection module. The architecture converts the received electrical signal into mechanical vibration through the piezoelectric effect and adopts an optical detection module to detect the mechanical vibration. We analyze the response function of the piezoelectric film to an RF signal, the noise-limited sensitivity of the optical detection module, and the system transfer function in the frequency domain. A simple on–off keying (OOK) modulation with carrier frequency 1 GHz is used to numerically evaluate the detection sensitivity. The result shows that considering the main noise sources in system, the signal detection sensitivity can reach around −116.6 dBm at bandwidth 5 MHz. Such sensitivity significantly outperforms that of the currently deployed long-term evolution (LTE) system. Finally, we conduct preliminary experiments based on an off-the-shelf aluminium nitride piezoelectric film, which shows that the vibration amplitude based on the theoretical prediction can be achieved.