Researchers Develop Ultrafast Signal Processing Microwave Photonics Chip

Recently, a research team led by Prof. Wang Cheng of the Department of Electrical Engineering at City University of Hong Kong has successfully developed a world-leading microwave photonics (MWP) chip. This chip is able to utilize the optical principle to carry out ultra-fast analog electronic signal processing and computation.
The chip is not only 1000 times faster than conventional electronic processors, but also consumes less energy. Its wide range of applications covers a variety of areas such as 5/6G wireless communication systems, high-resolution radar systems, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and image/video processing.
The team collaborated with the Chinese University of Hong Kong on the research, which has been published in the journal Nature, titled Integrated Lithium Niobate Microwave Photonic Processing Engine.
With the rapid expansion of wireless networks, the Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud-based services, the demand for underlying RF systems has grown exponentially. Microwave photonics (MWP) technology offers an effective solution to these challenges with its unique advantages of generating, transmitting, and processing microwave signals by utilizing optical components. However, integrated MWP systems have been facing multiple challenges such as simultaneous realization of ultra-high-speed analog signal processing, chip-scale integration, high fidelity and low power consumption.
To address these challenges, Prof. Wang Cheng's research team has developed a novel MWP system. The system innovatively integrates ultra-fast electro-optical (EO) conversion with low-loss multifunctional signal processing on a single chip, an achievement that has never been realized in previous research.
This outstanding performance is made possible by an integrated MWP processing engine based on a thin-film lithium niobate (LN) platform. This engine is capable of performing a wide range of analog signal processing and computational tasks. According to the report, this chip not only has an ultra-wide processing bandwidth of 67 GHz, but also has excellent computational accuracy.
Over the years, the team has been working on the research of integrated LN photonic platforms. It is worth mentioning that in 2018, colleagues at Harvard University and Nokia Bell Labs developed the world's first CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor)-compatible integrated electro-optical modulator on a thin-film lithium niobate (LN) platform, which laid a solid foundation for the current research breakthrough. Thin-film lithium niobate (LN) has been dubbed the "silicon of photonics" because of its importance in the field of photonics, which is comparable to silicon in microelectronics.
This work not only opens up a whole new field of research - thin-film lithium niobate (LN) microwave photonics, but also enables microwave photonics chips with compact size, high signal fidelity, and low latency, among other advantages. More importantly, this breakthrough represents a new direction for chip-scale analog electronic processing and computation engines.