Wireless link using on-chip photonic integrated millimeter-wave sources

Over the last few years wireless link data traffic has drastically increased due to a change in the way today's society creates, shares, and consumes information. Millimeter-waves (30-300 GHz) have a great advantage due to the wide bandwidths available for carrying information, enabling broadband wireless communications. Photonics is a key technology for millimeter wave signal generation and to develop compact transmitters operating frequency carriers in this range, recently have been demonstrated the use of photonic integration to reduce size and cost. In this paper, we present two Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC) structures designed for signal generation using the optical heterodyne technique. We demonstrate a 1 Gbps data rate wireless link. Both photonic millimeter-wave sources are fabricated using some building blocks such as Multimode Interference Reflectors (MIRs) which are used for being integrated on-chip in these structures, without need of cleaved facets to define the laser cavity. This fact enables us to locate any of these structures at any location within the photonic chip.