A reconfigurable photonic bandpass RF filter employing a semiconductor optical amplifier and an Opto-VLSI processor - art. no. 64141F

In this paper, a reconfigurable photonic bandpass RF filter employing a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) and an Opto-VLSI processor is proposed where a high coherent RF modulated laser carrier is fed into the SOA and through cross-gain modulation. a low coherence RF-modulated amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) can be generated. By spectrally slicing the ASE with an optical comb filter, RF-modulated wavebands of different centre wavelengths are generated. These RF-modulated wavebands are then processed by an Opto-VLSI processor which arbitrarily shapes the intensity profile of the wavebands. A high-dispersion optical fibre introduces linear true-time delays between the different wavebands so that after photodetection a photonic bandpass RF filter with multiple taps is realised. The proof-of-concept of the photonic bandpass filter is experimentally demonstrated, and results show that the filter can operate at 3.6 GHz with more than 25 dB rejection and its working frequency can be tuned by reconfigurable holograms generated by the Opto-VLSI processor. The filter can work with the laser carrier wavelength in the range of 1523nm to 1566nm without any optical coherence noises.