First programmable photonic processing module (Optica, 2, 10, 854-859 (2015))

Integrated microwave photonics, an emerging technology combining radio frequency (RF) engineering and integrated photonics, has great potential to be adopted for wideband analog processing applications. We use a grid of tunable Mach–Zehnder couplers interconnected in a two-dimensional mesh network, to demonstrate for the first time a programmable photonic processing unit with a free spectral range of 14 GHz to enable RF filters featuring continuous and variable passband shaping ranging from a 55 dB extinction notch filter to a 1.6 GHz bandwidth flat-top filter.

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