A monolithic distributed phase shifter based on right-handed nonlinear transmission lines at 30 GHz

The epitaxial material, device structure, and corresponding equivalent large signal circuit model of GaAs planar Schottky varactor diode are successfully developed to design and fabricate a monolithic phase shifter, which is based on right-handed nonlinear transmission lines and consists of a coplanar waveguide transmission line and periodically distributed GaAs planar Schottky varactor diode. The distributed-Schottky transmission-line-type phase shifter at a bias voltage greater than 1.5 V presents a continuous 0°–360° differential phase shift over a frequency range from 0 to 33 GHz. It is demonstrated that the minimum insertion loss is about 0.5 dB and that the return loss is less than-10 dB over the frequency band of 0–33 GHz at a reverse bias voltage less than 4.5 V. These excellent characteristics, such as broad differential phase shift, low insertion loss, and return loss, indicate that the proposed phase shifter can entirely be integrated into a phased array radar circuit.

Photonic microwave true time delays for phased array antennas using a 49 GHz FSR integrated optical micro-comb source[Invited]

We demonstrate significantly improved performance of a microwave true time delay line based on an integrated optical frequency comb source. The broadband micro-comb(over 100 nm wide) features a record low free spectral range(FSR) of 49 GHz, resulting in an unprecedented record high channel number(81 over the C band)—the highest number of channels for an integrated comb source used for microwave signal processing. We theoretically analyze the performance of a phased array antenna and show that this large channel count results in a high angular resolution and wide beam-steering tunable range. This demonstrates the feasibility of our approach as a competitive solution toward implementing integrated photonic true time delays in radar and communications systems.