Silicon Integrated Microwave Photonic Mixer Based on Cascaded Microring Resonator Modulators

Abstract

In this letter, we propose an ultra-compact integrated microwave photonic mixer employing cascaded silicon microring resonator modulators (MRMs), which achieves a wide RF/LO bandwidth of up to 32 GHz while maintaining a high conversion efficiency of up to −12 dB. According to the experimental results, the conversion efficiency is insensitive to RF power fluctuations and can be enhanced by increasing the optical power. Furthermore, the linearity of the mixer is characterized, which shows a spurious-free dynamic range of 83.8 dBc $\cdot $ Hz2/3. The proposed scheme results in a significant reduction in device footprint, and comparable performance to the microwave photonic mixers reported previously, which demonstrates the feasibility of the silicon microring modulator for analog applications, such as radio over fiber communications, or microwave photonics.