High-power photonic transmitter-mixer with ultra-wide O-E (50 GHz) and IF (26 GHz) modulation bandwidths for wireless data transmission

We demonstrate a novel photonic transmitter-mixer (PTM) module with state-of-the-art wide optical-to-electrical (OE) (66-116 GHz), intermediate-frequency (IF) modulation bandwidths (26 GHz), and a low coupling loss (-2 dB). The full module is composed of an active near-ballistic unitraveling-carrier photodiode (NBUTC-PD) and the passive millimeter-wave components, which are fabricated on the aluminum nitride substrate with conductor on its backside for excellent thermal sinking. Compared with the control without backside conductor, our new design exhibits a significant wider IF modulation bandwidth (26 vs. 14 GHz), higher saturation current (18 vs. 14 mA), with the same O-E bandwidth (66-116, 50 GHz) and low coupling loss (-2 dB). To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest IF modulation bandwidth (26 GHz) with widest fractional O-E bandwidth (55%) among all the reported photonic transmitters.