Thursday 29 October 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.