1-to-N terahertz integrated switches enabling multi-beam antennas Articles uri icon

authors

  • DECHWECHPRASIT, PANISA
  • LEES, HARRISON
  • HEADLAND, DANIEL JONATHAN
  • FUMEAUX, CHRISTOPHE
  • WITHAYACHUMNANKUL, WITHAWAT

published in

publication date

  • November 2023

start page

  • 1551

end page

  • 1558

issue

  • 11

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 2334-2536

abstract

  • Implementing terahertz circuits and system designs relies on integrating reconfigurable devices such as switches, to fulfill a critical role in controlling and manipulating the flow of terahertz signals on the chip. Although there have been several demonstrations of on-off switching in the terahertz range, there have been no demonstrations of 1-to -N switching, to our knowledge. This pronounced lack of dynamically reconfigurable routing has severely limited the achievable complexity of terahertz systems. To address this, we propose 1-to -N switches made of cascaded disk resonators integrated into a substrateless silicon waveguide platform. A single switch can be controlled via photoexcitation using a low-power 658-nm laser focused onto the disk resonator, turning off the resonance and inhibiting coupling into a crossing port. The measurement results demonstrate that the proposed switch has low insertion loss, which can be attributed to the inherently low dissipation of the platform. The proposed on-off switch achieves a maximum insertion loss of 1.2 dB, and the maximum extinction ratio of the switch is 16.1 dB with 1.5 GHz of bandwidth. Furthermore, a 1-to-3 switch is monolithically integrated together with a Luneburg lens in order to project each of its output ports to a different far-field direction and, thereby, translate the switching operation into a form of reconfigurable beam control for future applications. (c) 2023 Optica Publishing Group under the terms of the Optica Open Access Publishing Agreement

subjects

  • Industrial Engineering