An Integrated Millimeter-Wave Satellite Radiometer Working at Room-Temperature with High Photon Conversion Efficiency

Abstract

In this work, the design of an integrated 183GHz radiometer frontend for earth observation applications on satellites is presented. By means of the efficient electro-optic modulation of a laser pump with the observed millimeter-wave signal followed by the detection of the generated optical sideband, a room-temperature low-noise receiver frontend alternative to conventional Low Noise Amplifiers (LNAs) or Schottky mixers is proposed. Efficient millimeter-wave to 1550 nm upconversion is realized via a nonlinear optical process in a triply resonant high-Q Lithium Niobate (LN) Whispering Gallery Mode (WGM) resonator. By engineering a micromachined millimeter-wave cavity that maximizes the overlap with the optical modes while guaranteeing phase matching, the system has a predicted normalized photon-conversion efficiency ≈10−1 per mW pump power, surpassing the state-of-the-art by around three orders of magnitude at millimeter-wave frequencies. A piezo-driven millimeter-wave tuning mechanism is designed to compensate for the fabrication and assembly tolerances and reduces the complexity of the manufacturing process.

Standing-Wave Feeding for High-Gain Linear Dielectric Resonator Antenna (DRA) Array

“…From this perspective, DRAs come with numerous beneficial features such as high radiation efficiency, easy excitation scheme, light weight, and small size [8][9][10][11]. One of the main limitations of the DRA is its relatively low gain [12]; hence, dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) arrays are a preferred choice for many applications [13,14].…”

Generating multiple resonances in ultrathin silicon for highly selective THz biosensing

“…Moreover, the proposed absorber structure can provide an ultrathin geometry in comparison to all other dielectric resonator based absorbers which makes it suitable for the small scale systems [30,42]. Furthermore, these days, achieving the controllability and tunability in the response of THz devices is being investigated for avoiding the re-fabrication [43,44]. The 2D material like graphene is popular for this sort of implementation [45].…”