The next generation of radar (radio detection and ranging) systems needs to be based on software-defined radio to adapt to variable environments, with higher carrier frequencies for smaller antennas and broadened bandwidth for increased resolution. Today's digital microwave components (synthesizers and analogue-to-digital converters) suffer from limited bandwidth with high noise at increasing frequencies, so that fully digital radar systems can work up to only a few gigahertz, and noisy analogue up- and downconversions are necessary for higher frequencies. In contrast, photonics provide high precision and ultrawide bandwidth, allowing both the flexible generation of extremely stable radio-frequency signals with arbitrary waveforms up to millimetre waves, and the detection of such signals and their precise direct digitization without downconversion. Until now, the photonics-based generation and detection of radio-frequency signals have been studied separately and have not been tested in a radar system. Here we present the development and the field trial results of a fully photonics-based coherent radar demonstrator carried out within the project PHODIR. The proposed architecture exploits a single pulsed laser for generating tunable radar signals and receiving their echoes, avoiding radio-frequency up- and downconversion and guaranteeing both the software-defined approach and high resolution. Its performance exceeds state-of-the-art electronics at carrier frequencies above two gigahertz, and the detection of non-cooperating aeroplanes confirms the effectiveness and expected precision of the system.

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A photonic analog-to-digital converter exploiting a sample time-interleaving approach is presented, showing more than 7 effective bits for input signals up to 40GHz and bandwidth up to 200MHz. The effective 1-to-4 optical sample parallelization scheme does not contaminate the low sampling jitter with limited crosstalk. A real-time digital post-processing is also added to increase the ADC linearity and to minimize the spurious tones induced by the digital data interleaving. The results show that the scheme is fundamentally limited by the sampling jitter and it approaches the theoretical limits for the considered signal frequencies. Discussions are also reported, demonstrating that the proposed photonic ADC can be upgraded to accept signals with larger bandwidth without performance reductions. © 2013 IEEE

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We present a photonic integrated circuit (PIC) transceiver for frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) LiDAR applications. The transmitter consists of a widely tunable sampled grating distributed Bragg reflector laser (SGDBR) and a frequency discriminator which combines multimode interference couplers, a tunable asymmetric Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (a-MZI), and balanced photodiodes. The frequency discriminator converts frequency fluctuations of the laser to amplitude fluctuations of the photodiode currents. This provides an error signal for feedback into the laser cavity for frequency stabilization. Frequency modulation is obtained by a phase shifter in the a-MZI which tunes the quadrature point of the filter and the frequency where the error is zero. An on-chip receiver couples power from the transmitter to self-heterodyne with the time-delayed echo of a distant object. The generated beat frequency of the self-heterodyne measurement gives the echo signals time-of-flight to obtain the distance and velocity of the reflecting object. The theory of the components is described, and characterization of the transmitter and receiver is presented.

When I started out at UC Santa Barbara as a PhD student in 2015, there was no funding until the AIM project proposal got accepted. Without funding no work gets done, so first I am grateful to Prof. Rod Alferness for funding me for the first year and Prof. John Bowers for funding me for the rest of my PhD. To John, thanks for giving me complete freedom at work without which I could not have explored so many different areas in research. I enjoyed our conversation in the monthly meetings with Rod, John and Adel. For the first few months of my PhD I spent a lot of time with Adel doing a literature survey, it was an exciting journey in a new field. To Adel, thanks for filtering out the unsound ideas and helping me frame my thoughts. I enjoyed our white board discussions. To Roger, Clint, Takako and Andy at the Datacom meetings for discussions and helpful feedback. To Tin, for the fun we had at the New York Training conference. To Alex, Warren, Eric and Andy for the excellent office environment. To Alex, for inspiring me to get Scuba certified and also for tips on cooking Thai cuisine. To Aranya, for being my climbing buddy. To Sean, Simran Lawrence, Wilson and many others, for the fun time we had at UCSB badminton intramural. To Chirag, for providing helpful advice when needed. Thanks to Nicolas, Geza, Christos, Sarat, Aditya for helpful discussions. I would also like to thank Minh, Tony, Paolo, Yuan and Alan for their helpful advice. Special Thanks to Songtao for help with high speed measurements. Thanks to my Pappa, Mamma and Sairaj for the support during my PhD and for recharge time in India. Finally I would also thank Jeremiah Hebding, Brett Attaway, and SUNY for their foundry services. v

We demonstrate a simple method to fabricate efficient, electrically driven, polarized, and phosphor-free white semipolar (20-21) InGaN light-emitting diodes (LEDs) by adopting a top blue quantum well (QW) and a bottom yellow QW directly grown on (20-21) semipolar bulk GaN substrate. At an injection current of 20 mA, the fabricated 0.1 mm2 size regular LEDs show an output power of 0.9 mW tested on wafer without any backside roughing, a forward voltage of 3.1 V and two emission peaks located at 427 and 560 nm. A high polarization ratio of 0.40 was measured in the semipolar monolithic white LEDs, making them promising candidates for backlighting sources in liquid crystal displays (LCDs). Furthermore, a 3dB modulation bandwidth of 410 MHz in visible light communication (VLC) was obtained in the micro-size LEDs (µLEDs) with a size of 20×20 µm2 and 40×40 µm2, which could overcome the limitation of slow frequency response of yellow phosphor in commercial white LEDs combing blue LEDs and yellow phosphor.