Silicon photonics receive phased array sensors

Abstract

High-performance ultra-wideband Receive Phased Array Sensors (Rx-PAS) are disclosed, which have unique capabilities, enabled through photonic integrated circuits and novel optical architectures. Unique capabilities for a Rx-PAS are provided by wafer scale photonic integration including heterogeneous integration of III-V materials and ultra-low-loss silicon nitride waveguides. Novel aspects include optical multiplexing combining wavelength division multiplexing and/or a novel extension to array photodetectors providing the capability to combine many RF photonic signals with very low loss. The architecture includes tunable optical down-conversion, moving a chosen frequency band to baseband with high dynamic range; creating also a single frequency hand channelizer, which is also expanded to create a multiple tunable frequency band channelizer. Simultaneous multi-channel beamforming is achieved through optical power splitting of optical signals to create multiple exact replicas of the signals that are then processed independently.