In a groundbreaking development in the field of electrical engineering, a research team led by Professor Wang Cheng from the Department of Electrical Engineering (EE) at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) has created a cutting-edge microwave photonic chip capable of ultrafast analog electronic signal processing and computation using optics. This chip, which is significantly faster and more energy-efficient than traditional electronic processors, has a wide range of applications across various industries.
Published in the prestigious journal Nature under the title “Integrated Lithium Niobate Microwave Photonic Processing Engine,” the research represents a collaborative effort with The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). The development of the chip comes at a time when the rapid growth of wireless networks, Internet of Things, and cloud-based services has increased the demand for advanced radio frequency systems.
Microwave photonics (MWP) technology, which utilizes optical components for microwave signal generation, transmission, and manipulation, provides effective solutions to the challenges posed by modern communication systems. The integration of MWP systems has struggled to achieve high-speed analog signal processing with chip-scale integration, high fidelity, and low power consumption. To overcome these hurdles, Professor Wang and his team devised a MWP system that combines ultrafast electro-optic (EO) conversion with low-loss signal processing on a single integrated chip.
The key to the chip’s exceptional performance lies in its integration of a thin-film lithium niobate (LN) platform, capable of conducting diverse processing and computation tasks for analog signals. This platform enables high-speed analog computation with broad processing bandwidths of 67 GHz while ensuring excellent computation accuracies. The research team’s dedication to exploring the integrated LN photonic platform has paved the way for this groundbreaking achievement.
The development of the world-leading microwave photonic chip opens up a new research field in LN microwave photonics, enabling the creation of compact, high-fidelity, low-latency microwave photonics chips. This chip represents a significant advancement in chip-scale analog electronic processing and computing engines, with the potential to revolutionize a wide range of applications in wireless communication systems, radar systems, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and image/video processing.
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