Impulse radio ultrawideband pulse shaper based on a programmable photonic chip frequency discriminator

We report and experimentally demonstrate the generation of impulse radio ultrawideband (UWB) pulses using a photonic chip frequency discriminator. The discriminator consists of three add-drop optical ring resonators (ORRs) which are fully programmable using thermo-optical tuning. This discriminator chip in combination with a phase modulator forms a temporal differentiator where phase modulation is converted to intensity modulation (PM-IM conversion). By means of tailoring the discriminator response using either the individual or the cascade of drop and through responses of the ORRs, first-order or second-order temporal differentiations are obtained. Using this principle, the generation of UWB monocycle, doublet and modified doublet pulses are demonstrated. The use of this CMOS-compatible discriminator is promising for the realization of a compact and low cost UWB transmitter. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America