Silicon Photonics Millimeter-wave Full-Duplex Radios with Ultra-Wideband Automatic Self-Interference Cancellation

Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, College Station TX

Investigators

Abstract

Millimeter-wave (mm-wave) radios are essential for many applications such as radio backhaul links, small-cell 5G base stations, wireless signal relaying, vehicular radars, wireless links for virtual reality headsets, electronic warfare, and navigation systems. This project aims to demonstrate a mm-wave full-duplex radio based on silicon photonics and integrated electronics that can advance communications and sensing capabilities for both civilian and defense applications. The project will develop new silicon photonics mm-wave interference cancellers to significantly improve the performance of mm-wave full-duplex radios. The advanced knowledge of modeling and designing silicon photonics and complementary-metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) circuits created by this project will be leveraged to investigate other integrated photonics systems such as the electro-optical Lidars and high-speed data converters. The outcome of this project will have significant potential impacts in both wireless and semiconductor industries. In addition, the research results generated through this project will be used in an advanced graduate course developed by the principal investigators. The project also promotes outreach activities to increase broader student participation in science and engineering, including annual summer camps for high school teachers and students. The research and educational results of this work will be widely disseminated to academic, industrial and government sectors. The goal of this project is to develop a novel chip-scale silicon photonics mm-wave full-duplex transceiver architecture with ultra-wideband self-interference cancellation capability based on wireless channel response estimation using hybrid silicon photonics and nanometer CMOS chips. While it is extremely challenging through conventional electronic approaches to achieve an ultra-wideband self-interference cancellation with real-time wireless channel response estimation at mm-wave frequencies, silicon photonics technology has the potential to accomplish mm-wave interference cancellation with simultaneous ultra-wide bandwidth and small footprint. The goal will be accomplished by several research tasks: (1) Design a hybrid mm-wave full-duplex transceiver architecture based on wideband antennas with orthogonal polarization, a photonically-enabled feedforward canceller, and an analog canceller unit along with performance analysis. (2) Develop wideband antennas with orthogonal polarizations for wideband self-interference cancellation in antenna domain. (3) Design and build a novel silicon photonics unit and its components as a feedforward canceller in RF circuit domain including modulators, interferometers, delay lines, combiners, as well as algorithms and hardware for their automatic calibration and tuning to address process variations and estimate wireless channel response. (4) Implement a novel nanoscale CMOS chip including power amplifier, low-noise amplifier, up- and down-converters, analog canceller circuitry, frequency synthesizer, and automatic tuning hardware. (5) Integrate silicon photonics and CMOS chips along with wideband antennas and perform system-level tests. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.