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Comb-based radiofrequency photonic filters with rapid tunability and high selectivity

Nature Photonics volume 6, pages 186–194 (2012)Cite this article

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Abstract

Photonic technologies have received considerable attention regarding the enhancement of radiofrequency electrical systems, including high-frequency analogue signal transmission, control of phased arrays, analog-to-digital conversion and signal processing. Although the potential of radiofrequency photonics for the implementation of tunable electrical filters over broad radiofrequency bandwidths has been much discussed, the realization of programmable filters with highly selective filter lineshapes and rapid reconfigurability has faced significant challenges. A new approach for radiofrequency photonic filters based on frequency combs offers a potential route to simultaneous high stopband attenuation, fast tunability and bandwidth reconfiguration. In one configuration, tuning of the radiofrequency passband frequency is demonstrated with unprecedented (∼40 ns) speed by controlling the optical delay between combs. In a second, fixed filter configuration, cascaded four-wave mixing simultaneously broadens and smoothes the comb spectra, resulting in Gaussian radiofrequency filter lineshapes exhibiting an extremely high (>60 dB) main lobe to sidelobe suppression ratio and (>70 dB) stopband attenuation.

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Figure 1: Representative operation of an optical frequency comb-based multi-tap RF photonic filter.
Figure 2: Achieving rapid electronic frequency tunability of the RF filter using a dual-comb approach.
Figure 3: Rapid frequency tunability of the RF filter.
Figure 4: Demonstration of the bandwidth tunability of the RF filter.
Figure 5: Direct, high-accuracy generation of Gaussian apodized broadband combs.
Figure 6: Achieving high stop-band attenuation RF filters.

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Acknowledgements

This project was supported in part by the Naval Postgraduate School (grant no. N00244-09-1-0068) under the National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship programme. Any opinion, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors. The authors thank V. Torres-Company, J. McKinney and D. Peroulis for helpful discussions.

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Author notes

  1. V. R. Supradeepa, Christopher M. Long & Ehsan Hamidi

    Present address: Present address: OFS Laboratories, Somerset, New Jersey, USA (V.R.S.); EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland (C.M.L.); Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA (E.H.),

  2. V. R. Supradeepa, Christopher M. Long and Rui Wu: These authors contributed equally to this work

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA

    V. R. Supradeepa, Christopher M. Long, Rui Wu, Fahmida Ferdous, Ehsan Hamidi, Daniel E. Leaird & Andrew M. Weiner

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Contributions

C.M.L., R.W. and F.F. performed rapid tuning experiments, with assistance from E.H. V.R.S. and R.W. performed cascaded four-wave mixing experiments. R.W. performed bandwidth reconfiguration experiments with assistance from D.E.L. The project was organized and coordinated by A.M.W. A.M.W. led the writing of the manuscript, with contributions from V.R.S., C.M.L., R.W. and D.E.L.

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Correspondence to Andrew M. Weiner.

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Supradeepa, V., Long, C., Wu, R. et al. Comb-based radiofrequency photonic filters with rapid tunability and high selectivity. Nature Photon 6, 186–194 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2011.350

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