Advances on silicon-based integrated microwave photonics

Microwave photonic systems have huge potential for both existing and future applications, including radar, radiofrequency sensing and modern wireless communications due to their distinct advantages in terms of ultra-wide bandwidth, flexible tunability, and immunity to electromagnetic interference. There is a strong research trend in microwave photonic systems towards integration and miniaturization, resulting in multiple radio frequency functions on a single chip which is both compact and light weight. Thus integrated microwave photonics has attracted a lot of attentions and achieves significant improvements in last ten years. In this paper, we will review some research progresses on silicon-based integrated microwave photonics in our group, including highly efficient micro heater on silicon photonic chip, chip-scale microwave waveform generation, on-chip true time delay, and microwave photonic processing and measurement. Our schemes are all fabricated on silicon-on-insulator chips and have advantages of compactness and capability to integrate with electronic units. These chips may motivate the great application potentials in silicon-based integrated microwave photonics.