Silicon Photonic Multipurpose Circuit Driven by Integrated Electro‐Optic Frequency Comb Source

The growing scale and complexity of photonic integrated circuits (PICs) enable the design methodology of photonics chips to transit from application‐specific toward multipurpose architectures. While optical frequency comb (OFC) sources have been utilized by many application‐specific PICs to add new functionalities or to enhance their parallel processing capability, there are very few reports on their use in such PICs. In this work, we demonstrate a silicon multipurpose PIC driven by a monolithically integrated electro‐optical OFC generator. It consists of two functional blocks: a dual‐series Mach–Zehnder modulator to generate OFC signals with tunable frequency spacing and line count, and an array of Mach–Zehnder‐interferometer‐based micro‐ring modulators which can implement filtering, weighting, and modulation to each comb line. Compared with previous multipurpose PICs whose applications are mainly limited in the domain of analogue optical signal processing, our architecture possesses an extended application scope by first supporting high‐speed data transmissions at both optical and THz frequencies. Specifically, the supported functionalities include optical WDM data transmission, arbitrary RF signal generation, THz‐over‐cable data transmission, and parallel optical computing. This work provides a new design paradigm for comb‐driven multipurpose integrated photonic chips.