Abstract
The increasing ubiquity of mobile services is driving wireless communications to fully exploit spatial-division multiplexing (SDM). However, SDM’s key enabling technology – the beamformer – is hindered by scalability hurdles that electronic technologies have failed to overcome. This manuscript tackles this challenge by introducing a novel photonic beamforming architecture, which leverages and combines key techniques of both past photonic beamformers and cutting-edge optical communications. The proposed architecture makes use of wavelength-division multiplexing, coherent detection, and programmable photonic processing to realize a truly scalable photonic beamformer. The proposed architecture is analytically and numerically validated, as well as experimentally demonstrated. The experimental validation includes a practical demonstration of two RF beams at
$12 \,\mathrm{G}\mathrm{Hz}$
, each carrying a 1 GBd QPSK signal, being independently beamformed, and down-converted to
$5 \,\mathrm{G}\mathrm{Hz}$
.
PDF Article
More Like This
On-chip microwave photonic beamformer circuits operating with phase modulation and direct detection
Leimeng Zhuang, Marcel Hoekman, Caterina Taddei, Arne Leinse, René G. Heideman, Adriaan Hulzinga, Jaco Verpoorte, Ruud M. Oldenbeuving, Paulus W. L. van Dijk, Klaus-J. Boller, and Chris G. H. Roeloffzen
Opt. Express 22(14) 17079-17091 (2014)
Cited By
You do not have subscription access to this journal. Cited by links are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an Optica member, or as an authorized user of your institution.
Contact your librarian or system administrator
or
Login to access Optica Member Subscription