Chip-Based Microwave Photonic Payload Repeater for High Throughput Satellites

High-throughput satellite (HTS) is an ideal way to realize cross-regional massive, multifaceted digital exchange services, and it requires a signal processing module that can be massively multiplexed and has high flexibility. Due to the limitations of the frequency characteristics, microwave integrated circuits are difficult to meet this requirement. One solution to this problem is photonic integrated circuits (PICs). However, full-size PIC satellite payloads containing main optoelectronic components are extremely challenging to implement on monolithic or hybrid integrated platforms. Here, the study demonstrates a hybrid integrated on-chip microwave-photonic satellite repeater with large-scale multiplexing potential and high flexibility. This is a demonstration of a hybrid integration of a InP/Si3N4 external cavity laser, arrayed InP modulators, and semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs), as well as multifunctional Si3N4 signal processors, to fulfill a 1 × 4 Ka-band repeater module with on-chip arrayed frequency down-conversion and outstanding narrowband photonic channelization. When combined with the full-chip photonic RF repeater, broadband, highly integrated, and cost-effective communications satellite payloads will become realizable more quickly in the near future.