• HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
Monday, August 25, 2025
BIOENGINEER.ORG
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
No Result
View All Result
Bioengineer.org
No Result
View All Result
Home NEWS Science News Chemistry

Photonic microwave generation using on-chip optical frequency combs

Bioengineer by Bioengineer
April 20, 2020
in Chemistry
Reading Time: 3 mins read
0
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedinShare on RedditShare on Telegram

IMAGE

Credit: Junqiu Liu and Jijun He (EPFL)

In our information society, the synthesis, distribution, and processing of radio and microwave signals are ubiquitous in wireless networks, telecommunications, and radars. The current tendency is to use carriers in higher frequency bands, especially with looming bandwidth bottlenecks due to demands for e.g. 5G and the “Internet of Things”. “Microwave photonics”, a combination of microwave engineering and optoelectronics, might offer a solution.

A key building block of microwave photonics is optical frequency combs, which provide hundreds of equidistant and mutually coherent laser lines. They are ultrashort optical pulses emitted with a stable repetition rate that corresponds precisely to the frequency spacing of comb lines. The photodetection of the pulses produces a microwave carrier.

In recent years there has been significant progress on chip-scale frequency combs generated from nonlinear microresonators driven by continuous-wave lasers. These frequency combs rely on the formation of dissipative Kerr solitons, which are ultrashort coherent light pulses circulating inside optical microresonators. Because of this, these frequency combs are commonly called “soliton microcombs”.

Generating soliton microcombs needs nonlinear microresonators, and these can be directly built on-chip using CMOS nanofabrication technology. The co-integration with electronic circuitry and integrated lasers paves the path to comb miniaturization, allowing a host of applications in metrology, spectroscopy and communications.

Publishing in Nature Photonics, an EPFL research team led by Tobias J. Kippenberg has now demonstrated integrated soliton microcombs with repetition rates as low as 10 GHz. This was achieved by significantly lowering the optical losses of integrated photonic waveguides based on silicon nitride, a material already used in CMOS micro-electronic circuits, and which has also been used in the last decade to build photonic integrated circuits that guide laser light on-chip.

The scientists were able to manufacture silicon nitride waveguides with the lowest loss in any photonic integrated circuit. Using this technology, the generated coherent soliton pulses have repetition rates in both the microwave K- (~20 GHz, used in 5G) and X-band (~10 GHz, used in radars).

The resulting microwave signals feature phase noise properties on par with or even lower than commercial electronic microwave synthesizers. The demonstration of integrated soliton microcombs at microwave repetition rates bridges the fields of integrated photonics, nonlinear optics and microwave photonics.

The EPFL team achieved a level of optical losses low enough to allow light to propagate nearly 1 meter in a waveguide that is only 1 micrometer in diameter -100 times smaller than that a human hair. This loss level is still more than three orders of magnitude higher than the value in optical fibers, but represents the lowest loss in any tightly confining waveguide for integrated nonlinear photonics to date.

Such low loss is the result of a new manufacturing process developed by EPFL scientists – the “silicon nitride photonic Damascene process”. “This process, when carried out using deep-ultraviolet stepper lithography, gives truly spectacular performance in terms of low loss, which is not attainable using conventional nanofabrication techniques,” says Junqiu Liu, the paper’s first author who also lead the fabrication of silicon nitride nanophotonic chips at EPFL’s Center of MicroNanoTechnology (CMi). “These microcombs, and their microwave signals, could be critical elements for building fully integrated low-noise microwave oscillators for future architectures of radars and information networks.”

The EPFL team is already working with collaborators in US to develop hybrid-integrated soliton microcomb modules that combine chip-scale semiconductor lasers. These highly compact microcombs can impact many applications, e.g. transceivers in datacenters, LiDAR, compact optical atomic clocks, optical coherence tomography, microwave photonics, and spectroscopy.

###

Reference

J. Liu, E. Lucas, A. S. Raja, J. He, J. Riemensberger, R. N. Wang, M. Karpov, H. Guo, R. Bouchand and T. J. Kippenberg, “Photonic microwave generation in the X- and K-band using integrated soliton microcombs”, Nature Photonics 20 April 2020. DOI: 10.1038/s41566-020-0617-x

Media Contact
Nik Papageorgiou
[email protected]

Related Journal Article

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41566-020-0617-x

Tags: Chemistry/Physics/Materials SciencesElectrical Engineering/ElectronicsElectromagneticsOpticsSuperconductors/SemiconductorsTelecommunications
Share12Tweet8Share2ShareShareShare2

Related Posts

Revolutionary Advances in Indole Chemistry Promise to Speed Up Drug Development

Revolutionary Advances in Indole Chemistry Promise to Speed Up Drug Development

August 25, 2025
blank

Scientists Create Molecule Advancing Key Step in Artificial Photosynthesis

August 25, 2025

First-ever observation of the transverse Thomson effect unveiled

August 23, 2025

Breakthrough in Computer Hardware Advances Solves Complex Optimization Challenges

August 23, 2025
Please login to join discussion

POPULAR NEWS

  • blank

    Molecules in Focus: Capturing the Timeless Dance of Particles

    142 shares
    Share 57 Tweet 36
  • Breakthrough in Computer Hardware Advances Solves Complex Optimization Challenges

    141 shares
    Share 56 Tweet 35
  • New Drug Formulation Transforms Intravenous Treatments into Rapid Injections

    115 shares
    Share 46 Tweet 29
  • Neuropsychiatric Risks Linked to COVID-19 Revealed

    81 shares
    Share 32 Tweet 20

About

We bring you the latest biotechnology news from best research centers and universities around the world. Check our website.

Follow us

Recent News

Preventing Cracks in Flexible Electronics’ Polymer Substrates

Supplementary Motor Area Shapes Parkinson’s Gait Impairment

Sugars Signal Guard Cell Ion Transport in Red Light

  • Contact Us

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
No Result
View All Result
  • Homepages
    • Home Page 1
    • Home Page 2
  • News
  • National
  • Business
  • Health
  • Lifestyle
  • Science

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.