Reconfigurable On-chip Photoconductive Switches

TL;DR

This paper introduces monolithic, scalable silicon photonic switches that enable efficient, low-power optical control of microwave signals, advancing reconfigurable microwave systems with practical integration.

Contribution

The work presents a CMOS-compatible silicon photonic chip with monolithic, reconfigurable microwave switches that outperform existing solutions in efficiency, power consumption, and scalability.

Findings

Higher switching efficiency than state-of-the-art

Requires significantly lower optical power

Scalable micrometer-scale device design

Abstract

Microwave photonics uses light to carry and process microwave signals over a photonic link. However, light can instead be used as a stimulus to microwave devices that directly control microwave signals. Such optically controlled amplitude and phase-shift switches are investigated for use in reconfigurable microwave systems, but they suffer from large footprint, high optical power level required for switching, lack of scalability and complex integration requirements, restricting their implementation in practical microwave systems. Here, we report Monolithic Optically Reconfigurable Integrated Microwave Switches (MORIMSs) built on a CMOS compatible silicon photonic chip that addresses all of the stringent requirements. Our scalable micrometer-scale switches provide higher switching efficiency and require optical power orders of magnitude lower than the state-of-the-art. Also, it opens a new research direction on silicon photonic platforms integrating microwave circuitry. This work has important implications in reconfigurable microwave and millimeter wave devices for future communication networks.