Integrated lithium niobate microwave photonic processing engine

Abstract

An integrated MWP processing engine based on a thin-film lithium niobate (LN) platform capable of performing computation tasks of analog signals up to 92G samples per second is provided. By integrating a high-speed electro-optic modulation block and a multi-purpose low-loss signal processing section on the same chip fabricated from a 4-inch wafer-scale process, we demonstrate high-speed analog computation, i.e. first- and second-order temporal integration and differentiation with computing accuracies up to 98.1%, and deploy these functions to showcase three proof-of-concept applications, namely, ordinary differential equation solving, ultra-wideband signal generation and high-speed edge detection of images. We further leverage the image edge detector to enable a photonic-assisted image segmentation model that effectively outlines boundaries of melanoma lesion in medical images, achieving orders of magnitude faster processing speed and lower power consumption than conventional electronic processors. Our ultrafast LN MWP engine provides compact, low-power, low-latency and cost-effective solutions.