Integrated Microring Spectrometer with In-Hardware Compressed Sensing to Break the Resolution-Bandwidth Limit for General Continuous Spectrum Analysis

Microspectrometers have numerous applications in mobile optical sensing due to their dramatic advantages of compact size, light weight, and low power consumption. Reconstructive spectrometers, based on computational algorithms, have garnered considerable interest as they exhibit superior resolution or spectral bandwidth. However, existing reconstructive spectrometer designs face challenges in spectral applicability, algorithm robustness, and the resolution-bandwidth limit. Here, a reconstructive spectrometer that utilizes a microring resonator (MRR) is proposed to achieve compressed sensing in hardware by decomposing an arbitrary continuous spectrum into a series of simple comb spectra. Owing to the presparse operation of the MRR, one needs to construct the comb spectra with a known line shape, only leaving the amplitude to be solved. Consequent random gratings measure the comb spectra, which are reconstructed with high robustness. Thanks to the independent engineering of spectral resolution and bandwidth, the approach breaks the traditional resolution-bandwidth limit. A narrowband signal of a dual peak at 0.2 nm and a broadband spectrum with a large spectral bandwidth of 60 nm and 300 spectral channels using only eight physical channels is retrieved, achieving an ultrahigh reconstructive compression ratio of 37.5. This work opens up the possibility of on-site spectral spectroscopy applications for the lab-on-a-chip system.

Automated summary

Reconstructive spectrometers based on computational algorithms are widely used in mobile optical sensing. This study proposes a reconstructive spectrometer design that utilizes a microring resonator to achieve hardware compression sensing, breaking the traditional resolution-bandwidth limit.