Ultra-wideband mm-wave remote antenna unit for radio-over-fiber distributed antenna systems in silicon photonics

This article presents what we believe to be a novel chip-scale 25-45-GHz re-configurable mm-wave remote antenna unit (RAU) for radio over fiber (RoF) distributed antenna systems. The proposed RAU architecture optimizes energy efficiency by operating directly at mm-wave frequencies, and spectral efficiency by selecting re-configurable RF photonic filters topology. Additionally, it achieves frequency agility by rejecting interferes and a small form factor by utilizing the SOI photonics process. Two photonic integrated circuits (PICs) that act as downlink and uplink units are presented while occupying a total area of 12.33 mm