Silicon photonics enabled hyper-wideband wireless communication link

We demonstrate the first silicon photonics enabled hyper-wideband wireless link with an instantaneous bandwidth of 12 GHz, which is 85% of the center frequency of 14 GHz. The silicon photonics based RF receiver consists of a four-channel optical phase encoder, an integrated hybrid-silicon mode-locked laser, and two silicon ring notch filters. The received CDMA RF wireless signal is correlated to baseband using coherent optical heterodyne at a data rate of 3 Gbps error-free with electronics bandwidth of only 3 GHz. Hyper-wideband RF transmission allows for data obfuscation and increased jamming resistance from narrowband interferers. The narrowband silicon photonic ring filters allow for further interference rejection of greater than 27 dB tunable over the full 20 GHz of RF spectrum.