Context
It is today well established, both among analogue and digital communication communities, that optics cannot be avoided in modern communication systems. Optics indeed offers crucial advantages over coaxial cables for signal transportation, in terms of propagation losses, bandwidth, and electromagnetic immunity.
In addition to the signal transportation, a major objective for radar and communication systems is then to perform the signal processing also in the optical domain, in order to avoid additional optical-to-electrical and electrical-to-optical conversion losses. This objective gave rise some decades ago to the emerging of a new research area, namely Microwave Photonics, whose rationale was to use the advantages of photonic technologies to provide functions in microwave systems that are very complex or even impossible to carry out directly in the elec-trical domain.
Besides, recent years have witnessed a growing investment on Silicon Photonics technology. The initial motivation for this technology is, through platforms such as EpixFab, to benefit from the electronics mass volume production yields and costs, by developing CMOS compatible fabrication processes for photonics devices.
Objectives
The objective of this project is to exploit the Silicon Photonics and photonic crystal structures potential in integration and functionalities toward the realization of an integrated optical processor. The targeted device is a reconfigurable finite impulse filter which, from the technological point of view, can be seen as a multiple (up to 8) arms interferometer, with controllable group delay, optical phase and intensity for each arm.
The device will be implemented in three applications, namely a bit sequence recognition setup for data stream synchronization, chromatic dispersion compensation, and in a reconfigurable RF filter for radar applications.
A key point in the project is that the degree of integration allowed by Silicon Photonics and photonic crystals approach must significantly reduce the optical phase instabilities between the arms of the interferometer, which makes possible the coherent operation of the device. A major objective of the project will therefore be to control and use the optical interferences to realize a filter with negative coefficients in the impulse response. Such a property leads to an increased flexibility in the RF filter design and performances, and will enable to operate with more sophisticated modulation formats (such as duo-binary) in the bit-pattern recognition application.
Scientific Production
see in HAL
Partners
Thales-TRT – IEF
Coordinator
Jérôme Bourderionnet (Thales-TRT)
(Foton leader : Mathilde GAY)
Funding
ANR (∼740 k€)
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