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The demand for wireless data has maintained a consistent exponential growth 50% over the past ten years. This demand is generated, as of 2023, from the 5.7 billion unique mobile users and an equal amount of machine-to-machine connections. Although demand rapidly increases, our spectral resources remain a fixed commodity. This imbalance has strained modern wireless networks and resulted in a dramatic inflation of spectral licensing cost to 80.9 Billion USD for 280 MHz in 2021. Increasing economic barriers to wireless communication can limit connectivity in developing and highly populated regions.
Creating more efficient wireless networks would alleviate congestion, reduce cost, and allow for the continued development of high-bandwidth applications. To mitigate the growing dis- parity between supply and demand of spectral resources requires developing novel radios which operate at a higher and broader bandwidth, that implement more advanced communication techniques which fully optimize spectral and spatial resources. Implementing more efficient duplexed communication techniques results in significant self-interference. The analog signal processing required to cancel self-interference, enabling high-bandwidth next-generation wireless networks, requires an optical solution.
First developed within the Lightwave Laboratory at Princeton University in 2009, Microwave Photonic Cancellation (MPC) demonstrated wideband removal of self-interference. His- torically, the pitfall of microwave photonic systems has been the high RF noise figure. The work within this thesis focuses on the continued development of MPCs via the exploration of novel architectures to improve RF performance metrics. Specifically, we demonstrated a balanced archi- tecture for relative-intensity noise suppression and a hybrid architecture for RF chain preservation. In addition to architectural improvements, we explored leveraging recent maturation in in-
tegrated photonic fabrication to achieve higher levels of productization with improved cancellation performance, robustness, and a significant reduction in size, weight, and power. A Balanced MPC was integrated onto an Indium Phosphide platform. Both passive and active silicon photonic MPCs were developed resulting in a 10-fold increase in instantaneous cancellation bandwidth compared to previous architectures.
In the last chapter of this work, the RF insights and experience gained through the development of the silicon photonic MPC are applied to the field of silicon neuromorphic photonics.
Adviser: Paul Prucnal