Silicon Integrated Subharmonic Mixer on a Photonic-Crystal Platform

Abstract

This paper presents a planar silicon integrated subharmonic mixer on top of a photonic-crystal platform. The local oscillator (LO) power is injected through a 2D photoniccrystal (PC) slab to a resonant cavity that effectively couples the signal to a planar bow-tie antenna. The same antenna, which is printed on the top of the PC cavity, contains an antiparallel Schottky diode pair which performs the down-conversion. The proposed design is a simple, easy to integrate, low cost, low profile device. Moreover, the described fabrication process is compatible with active components integration. The performance of the design has been experimentally demonstrated showing good agreement with the simulation and is comparable with the stateof-the-art of planar mixers. The work presented here is based on concepts and technologies from electronics and photonics domains and may be a good starting point for the creation of new devices, allowing the integration and upgrading of existing techniques from both worlds.

Design of 300 GHz Combined Doubler/Subharmonic Mixer Based on Schottky Diodes with Integrated MMIC Based Local Oscillator

“…At the beginning both approaches were independent; however, during the last decade the simultaneous use of photonic and electronic techniques has given rise to hybrid photonic-electronic devices. For example, the combination of Unitravelling Carrier Photodiodes (UTC-PD) and frequency multipliers has been proposed [3,4], and photonic techniques have been used for LO distribution [5], allowing to benefit from the best of both fields. Furthermore, progress in component integration has facilitated the design of submillimeter frequency multipliers and mixers, and therefore contributed to these advances [6][7][8][9][10].…”

A Millimeter-Wave 4th-Harmonic Schottky Diode Mixer with Integrated Local Oscillator

“…For receiver applications, several approaches for the integration of components for submillimeter-wave frequency multipliers and mixers have been proposed [1][2][3][4][5]. Very compact configurations can be found in [6,7]; however, even though in [6] the modular approach allows the creation of a dense and uniform array of receivers, the local oscillator (LO) is external, built as an independent element, which reduces the integration level.…”

Dual-Band and integrated detectors for submillimetre applications

“…A monolithic heterodyne receiver, as the one presented here, is a very attractive solution, which may allow the realization of compact two-dimensional multi-pixel array. The main results and the experimental validation of this work were published in [Tor20]. Conclusions and Future Prospects…”