Integrated microwave photonic true-time delay with interferometric delay enhancement based on Brillouin scattering and microring resonators

Abstract

True-time delays are important building blocks in modern radio frequency systems that can be implemented using integrated microwave photonics, enabling higher carrier frequencies, improved bandwidths, and a reduction in size, weight, and power. Stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) offers optically-induced continuously tunable delays and is thus ideal for applications that require programmable reconfiguration but previous approaches have been limited by large SBS gain requirements. Here, we overcome this limitation by using radio-frequency interferometry to enhance the Brillouin-induced delay applied to the optical sidebands that carry RF signals, while controlling the phase of the optical carrier with integrated silicon nitride microring resonators. We report a delay tunability over 600 ps exploiting an enhancement factor of 30, over a bandwidth of 1 GHz using less than 1 dB of Brillouin gain utilizing a photonic chip architecture based on Brillouin scattering and microring resonators.