Photonic-based integrated sources and antenna arrays for broadband wireless links in terahertz communications

This paper analyzes integrated components for ultra-broadband millimeter-wave wireless transmitters enabling the 5 G objective to increase the wireless data rates 10× to 100×. We have pursued the photonic-based approach to generate the millimeter-wave carrier (≈97 GHz in this paper) through photomixing. We have achieved up to 10 Gb s⁻¹ data rate using an OOK modulation format (to reduce latency) and either direct detection (DD) or coherent detection. We show that coherent detection enables a sensitivity improvement of 17 dB over DD. We also demonstrate in this work that such improvement can be achieved using as the transmitter a novel integrated antenna array—the self-complementary chessboard array. This avoids the use of complex coherent schemes at the receiver, enabling simple DD for ultra-broadband links. (paper)