Jinming Tao

With the rapid development of information technology, the global data volume has been continuously expanding, placing unprecedented demands on communication networks to accommodate precipitously increasing throughput. Thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) modulators, characterized by their large theoretical bandwidth, low half-wave voltage, and suitability for high-density integration, show great application potential in high-speed optical modules and optical interconnection networks. However, the persistent issue of velocity mismatch between radio frequency (RF) signals and optical carriers invariably hinders the utilization of higher-frequency bands, which restricts the modulation speed of the fabricated devices. In this paper, an electrode co-loaded with square serrations and T-shaped stubs was utilized to achieve precise velocity matching and excellent impedance matching. Leveraging this approach, a TFLN modulator chip with an electro-optic bandwidth far exceeding 67 GHz and a return loss of greater than 12 dB was successfully fabricated on a silicon substrate. The velocity of RF signals can be tuned by altering the lengths of the slow-wave structures, which provides guidance for the design and optimization of broadband modulators.

With the exponential growth in data density and user ends of wireless networks, fronthaul is tasked with supporting aggregate bandwidths exceeding thousands of gigahertz while accommodating high-order modulation formats. However, it must address the bandwidth and noise limitations imposed by optical links and devices in a cost-efficient manner. Here we demonstrate a high-fidelity fronthaul system enabled by self-homodyne digital-analog radio-over-fiber superchannels, using a broadband electro-optic comb and uncoupled multicore fiber. This self-homodyne superchannel architecture not only offers capacity boosting but also supports carrier-recovery-free reception. Our approach achieves a record-breaking 15,000 GHz aggregated wireless bandwidth, corresponding to a 0.879 Pb/s common public radio interface (CPRI) equivalent data rate. Higher-order formats up to 1,048,576 quadrature-amplitude-modulated (QAM) are showcased at a 100 Tb/s class data rate. Furthermore, we employ a packaged on-chip electro-optic comb as the sole optical source to reduce the cost, supporting a data rate of 100.5 Tb/s with the 1024-QAM format. These demonstrations propel fronthaul into the era of Pb/s-level capacity and exhibit the promising potential of integrated-photonics implementation, pushing the boundaries to new heights in terms of capacity, fidelity, and cost.

Recently, thin-film lithium niobate electro-optical modulators have developed rapidly and have become the core solution for the next generation of electro-optical problems. Compared with bulk lithium niobate modulators, these modulators not only retain the advantages of lithium niobate materials, such as low loss, high extinction ratio, high linear response and high optical power handling capabilities, but can also effectively improve some performance parameters, such as the voltage bandwidth performance of the modulator. Unfortunately, the extremely small electrode gap of thin-film lithium niobate EO (electro-optic) modulators causes metal absorption, resulting in higher microwave losses. The electro-optical performance of the modulator, thus, deteriorates at high frequencies. We designed traveling-wave electrodes with microstructures to overcome this limitation and achieve a 3 dB electro-optical bandwidth of 51.2 GHz. At the same time, we maintain low on-chip losses of <2 dB and a high extinction ratio of 15 dB. It is important to note that the devices we manufactured were metal-encapsulated and passed a series of reliability tests. The success of this modulator module marks a key step in the commercialization and application of thin-film lithium niobate modulation devices.

A simple photonics-based dual-channel system is proposed to simultaneously measure the Doppler frequency shift (DFS) and angle of arrival (AOA) of microwave signals. The system applies two parallel push–pull Mach–Zehnder modulators (MZMs) for carrier suppression dual-sideband (CS-DSB) modulation. The introduction of the reference signal results in a DFS measurement without direction ambiguity. The DFS can be determined by measuring the frequency of the down-converted intermediate frequency (IF) signal, and the AOA can be calculated by comparing the phase shift of the two channels. A proof-of-concept experiment shows that the DFS measurement error is less than 0.4 Hz during ±100 kHz, and the AOA measurement error is within 1.5° in a range of 0–70°.