Separate carrier tuning scheme for integrated optical delay lines in photonic beamformers

We implement and experimentally demonstrate the separate carrier tuning technique on an optical ring resonator-based integrated optical delay line. For the first time, the carrier tuner, the delay elements and the optical sideband filter are integrated on the same chip. The proposed approach allows to reduce the complexity of the delay unit and makes the bandwidth independent of the absolute RF frequency. The demonstrated principle can be conveniently employed in any integrated non-coherent optical beamformer system.