Toward a widely tunable narrow linewidth RF source utilizing an integrated heterogenous silicon photonic module

2013 
A system for generating widely tunable, narrow-line RF signals from a pair of injection-locked lasers has been developed. By injection seeding one laser with a sideband obtained from a second laser that is phase modulated by a spectrally pure low-frequency RF reference oscillator and then mixing these coherent optical outputs on a fast photodiode, RF with the same linewidth and phase noise characteristics as the reference oscillator can be produced. By using harmonics of the reference oscillator the RF output can be tuned over a much wider range than the reference oscillator while maintaining its narrow linewidth.Here we present the results of our efforts to develop an integrated version of this system, based on a silicon-photonic integrated circuit coupled to III-V semiconductor gain chips.Towards that goal we have successfully demonstrated an integrated module and shown tunable RF generation with a 1 Hz linewidth.
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