Universal electronic synthesis by microresonator-soliton photomixing

Published

May 13, 2025

Author(s)

Jizhao Zang, Travis Briles, Jesse Morgan, Andreas Beling, Scott Papp

Abstract

Access to electrical signals across the millimeter-wave (mmW) and terahertz (THz) bands offers breakthroughs for high-performance applications. Despite generations of revolutionary development, integrated electronics are challenging to scale at 100-1000 GHz operating frequencies. Therefore, new technologies that generate wideband and tunable electronic signals would propel advances in wireless communication, high-resolution imaging and scanning, spectroscopy, and network formation. Photonic approaches have been demonstrated for electronic signal generation, but at the cost of increased size and power consumption. Here, we describe a chip-scale, universal mmW frequency synthesizer, which uses integrated nonlinear photonics and high-speed photodetection to exploit the nearly limitless bandwidth of light. We use a photonic-integrated circuit to generate dual, microresonator-soliton frequency combs whose interferogram is fundamentally composed of harmonic signals spanning the mmW and THz bands. By phase coherence of the dual comb, we precisely stabilize and synthesize the interferogram to generate any output frequency from DC to >1000 GHz. Across this entire range, the synthesizer exhibits exceptional absolute fractional frequency accuracy and precision, characterized by an Allan deviation of 3x10-12 in 1 s measurements. We use a modified uni-traveling-carrier (MUTC) photodiode with a 3 dB bandwidth of 128 GHz to convert the interferogram to an electrical signal, generating continuously tunable tones across the entire mmW band. The synthesizer phase noise at a reference frequency of 150 GHz is -83 dBc/Hz at 100 kHz offset, which fundamentally exceeds the intrinsic performance of state-of-the-art CMOS electronics. Our work harnesses the coherence, bandwidth, and integration of photonics to universally extend the frequency range of current advanced-node CMOS microwave electronics to the mmW and THz.

Citation

arXiv

Pub Weblink

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08707

Pub Type

Websites

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2505.08707

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Citation

Zang, J. , Briles, T. , Morgan, J. , Beling, A. and Papp, S. (2025), Universal electronic synthesis by microresonator-soliton photomixing, arXiv, [online], https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2505.08707, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=959980, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08707 (Accessed October 8, 2025)