Photonic integrated circuits employing multi-core fiber for broadband radio beamsteering (Invited)

This paper presents an optical beamforming network based on a photonic integrated circuit employing a weaklycoupled multi-core fiber to connect the different antenna elements. The proposed beamformer enables a centralized control of the resulting steering angle. By means of wavelength tuning, fast and dynamic configuration of the induced delay (and associated beam steering angle) is achieved remotely. The experimental results confirm high throughput transmission (> 10 Gbps) with electrical data signals with up to 3GHz bandwidth in the 24 GHz RF band (K-band). Wireless transmission of 16QAM-modulated, 1.5 GHz-wide signals is demonstrated in the laboratory from –26˚ to 33˚ providing a scanning range of 59˚.