Fully reconfigurable compact RF photonic filters using high-Q silicon microdisk resonators

We present a fully reconfigurable fourth-order RF photonic filter on SOI platform with a tunable 3-dB bandwidth of 0.9-5 GHz, more than 38 dB optical out-of-band rejection, FSR up to 650 GHz, and compact size (total area 0.25 mm(2)). The center wavelength of the filter can be tuned over a wide range with a power consumption of 10 mW/nm. The filter architecture uses a unit-cell based approach to realize the desired filter specifications. The use of high-Q resonator-based components enables a dramatic reduction in size, weight and power (SWaP) of each unit cell, with the possibility of cascading a large number of these unit cells on a single chip. Thermal reconfiguration allows for low insertion loss and therefore results in the scalability of these filters. The demonstrated filter can be used in many different applications including RF photonic front-ends and high speed optical A/D conversion. (C)2011 Optical Society of America