CompADC · Sub-Terahertz Analog-to-Digital Conversion Using Integrated Soliton Microcombs
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2020-12-01 → 2022-11-30
- EU contribution
- €203,149
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Sub-Terahertz Analog-to-Digital Conversion Using Integrated Soliton Microcombs
Optical frequency combs, a Nobel Prize winning technology, provide a powerful tool to enable unprecedented precise measurements of frequency and time and allow for phase coherent link of optical and radio frequencies. Stable and coherent optical frequency combs represent in the time domain a unique type of mode-locked emission of optical pulses. The recent series of breakthroughs in compact optical frequency combs, particularly temporal dissipative Kerr soliton (DKS) microcombs, opened up a new way to generate high-coherence, high-repetition-rate optical frequency combs in compact microresonators, providing a promising technology to replace bulky mode-locked lasers (MLLs) and overcome the fundamental timing jitter limit of electronic analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). However, integrated soliton microcombs with high coherence, high repetition rates, and sufficient power for photonic ADCs remained largely unexplored. To solve these challenges, the project “Sub-Terahertz Analog-to-Digital Conversion Using Integrated Soliton Microcombs (CompADC)” aimed to demonstrate integrated soliton microcomb sources with repetition rates, high coherence, and high power for the applications in photonic-assisted analog-to-digital conversion (ADC). The innovative approach planned in the CompADC project was to implement a novel photonic integrated circuit that can generate Kerr-based soliton microcombs that can satisfy the requirement for the demonstration of a high-speed microwave photonic ADC with the improved effective number of bits. CompADC has achieved significant research output, such as fully integrated high-power soliton microcomb sources, and fully integrated single-mode, tunable lasers as optical LOs. Thes results can fundamentally solve the issues of the CompADC system but also, viewed more broadly, novel coherent communication receivers and LiDAR engines. Therefore, the CompADC project provided a venue to discover new technical challenges and has propelled the researcher and the host lab to carry out ground-breaking research results and disruptive solutions.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Modern information and communication technology has been propelling the rapid expansion of signal spectrum bandwidth towards the level of hundreds of GHz and even 1 Terahertz. Such wideband analog signals produced in physical world must be converted to a stream of data bits via analog-to-digital conversion (ADC), for ultra-fast and flexible digital signal processing (DSP). However, the random electron fluctuations in semiconductors set a fundamental limitation on the performance of electronic (ADCs), leading to an inherent trade-off between the sampling accuracy and bandwidth. State-of-the-art electronic ADCs typically have only GHz-level analog bandwidth, which is becoming an increasingly severe limitation on high-speed DSP applications. Although the adoption of mode-locked lasers (MLLs) can overcome some limitations using the ultra-stable pulse train for precise time-domain sampling, the GHz-level repetition rate and the challenging integration of MLLs prevents any usability of photonics-assisted ADC in practical applications. In the CompADC project, I propose to develop a radically-new photonic ADC scheme using chip-scale dual optical frequency combs, enabling real-time digitization of ultra-wideband RF and microwave signals with a bandwidth of > 100 GHz. This envisaged performance is enabled by the emerging dissipative Kerr soliton (DKS) microcombs generated in SiN microresonators, which produces a new type of on-chip mode-locked emission of optical pulses with repetition rates exceeding 100 GH. These phase-locked dual microcombs (signal comb and local oscillator comb) will perform precise frequency-domain decomposition and parallel frequency down-conversion of ultra-wideband microwave signals to the detectable range of lower-speed electronics. This CompADC approach has the clear potential to offer unparalleled performance and chip-scale integration for modern ultra-wideband signal processing and communication applications.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- ECOLE POLYTECHNIQUE FEDERALE DE LAUSANNE · LausanneCoordinatorSwitzerland
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union