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We demonstrate a Dual Active-Cavity RF modulator combining T-shaped spoked junction with a novel “half-rib” waveguide in a monolithic electronic-photonic platform. We measure a sideband efficiency of -52 dB at 66 GHz RF carrier frequency. 

We demonstrate a Dual Active-Cavity RF modulator combining T-shaped spoked junction with a novel “half-rib” waveguide in a monolithic electronic-photonic platform. We measure a sideband efficiency of -52 dB at 66 GHz RF carrier frequency. 

Electro-optic (EO) transduction of weak radio frequency (RF) and millimeter-wave signals, such as those received by an antenna, onto laser sidebands for processing in the optical domain requires efficient EO modulators. Microrings offer spatial density and efficiency advantages over Mach–Zehnder modulators (MZMs), but conventional single-ring modulators suffer a fundamental trade-off between resonantly enhanced conversion efficiency and the RF carrier frequency that it can accommodate. Dual-cavity “photonic molecule” modulators resolve this trade-off, allowing high efficiency independent of the RF carrier frequency by providing separate resonant supermodes to enhance the laser local oscillator (LO) and the narrowband RF-detuned sideband. However, the RF frequency is fixed at design time by geometry, with efficiency dropping quickly for RF carriers away from the design value. We propose a novel, to the best of our knowledge, triple-cavity configuration with an off-resonant middle ring acting as an effective tunable coupler between two active modulator cavities. This configuration provides wideband tunability of the target RF carrier while maintaining efficient sideband conversion. When the middle ring is passive (highQ), this configuration provides wide RF tunability with no efficiency penalty over the fixed dual-cavity case and could become an important building block for future RF/mm-wave photonic integrated circuits (PICs). 

We demonstrate a path to scalable, wavelength- multiplexed RF/mm-wave-photonic front-end systems-on-chip for radar and extreme massive MIMO arrays, in 300mm-foundry 45nm RF SOI CMOS. We demonstrate mm-wave-to-optical sensing elements comprising low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) mono- lithically integrated with triply-resonant photonic microring- resonator based modulators. The “photonic molecule” modulator concept breaks the conventional ring modulator conversion efficiency-bandwidth tradeoff and provides optimal performance RF-photonic applications, while supporting high bandwidth den- sities. We show a first experiment with projected noise figure of 24dB at 57GHz (30mW/element, -45dBm RF-input, 6dBm laser LO). The elements are tileable at small pitches, enabling photonic disaggregation of large-scale phased arrays. 

Flight-time failures of small Uncrewed Aerial Systems (sUAS) can have a severe impact on people or the environment. Therefore, sUAS applications must be thoroughly evaluated and tested to ensure their adherence to specified requirements, and safe behavior under real-world conditions, such as poor weather, wireless interference, and satellite failure. However, current simulation environments for autonomous vehicles, including sUAS, provide limited support for validating their behavior in diverse environmental contexts and moreover, lack a test harness to facilitate structured testing based on system-level requirements. We address these shortcomings by eliciting and specifying requirements for an sUAS testing and simulation platform, and developing and deploying it. The constructed platform, DroneWorld (\DW), allows sUAS developers to define the operating context, configure multi-sUAS mission requirements, specify safety properties, and deploy their own custom sUAS applications in a high-fidelity 3D environment. The DroneWorld Monitoring system collects runtime data from sUAS and the environment, analyzes compliance with safety properties, and captures violations. We report on two case studies in which we used our platform prior to real-world sUAS deployments, in order to evaluate sUAS mission behavior in various environmental contexts. Furthermore, we conducted a study with developers and found that DroneWorld simplifies the process of specifying requirements-driven test scenarios and analyzing acceptance test results. 

We report a demonstration of a 3-channel wavelength-selective switch with individual channel bandwidths of 2 GHz and drop port loss below 1 dB, paving the way for efficient spectrum utilization in quantum networking applications. 

We demonstrate device field characterization using NSOM collection and interaction measurement modes via the backside buried-oxide of large scale photonic circuits fabricated in monolithic electronics-photonics CMOS platforms (here a microdisk resonator) post-processed using flip-chip substrate-removal.