Publication: An Integrated Millimeter-Wave Satellite Radiometer Working at Room-Temperature with High Photon Conversion Efficiency
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2022-03-21
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MDPI AG
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Abstract
In this work, the design of an integrated 183 GHz radiometer frontend for earth observation
applications on satellites is presented. By means of the efficient electro-optic modulation of a
laser pump with the observed millimeter-wave signal followed by the detection of the generated
optical sideband, a room-temperature low-noise receiver frontend alternative to conventional Low
Noise Amplifiers (LNAs) or Schottky mixers is proposed. Efficient millimeter-wave to 1550 nm
upconversion is realized via a nonlinear optical process in a triply resonant high-Q Lithium Niobate
(LN) Whispering Gallery Mode (WGM) resonator. By engineering a micromachined millimeter-wave
cavity that maximizes the overlap with the optical modes while guaranteeing phase matching, the
system has a predicted normalized photon-conversion efficiency = 10-1 per mW pump power,
surpassing the state-of-the-art by around three orders of magnitude at millimeter-wave frequencies.
A piezo-driven millimeter-wave tuning mechanism is designed to compensate for the fabrication and
assembly tolerances and reduces the complexity of the manufacturing process.
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Keywords
Radiometers, Whispering gallery mode (wgm) resonators, Room-temperature receivers, Optoelectronic upconversion, High photon conversion efficiency, Millimeter-wave radiation, Satellite, Earth observation
Bibliographic citation
Abdalmalak, K. A., Botello, G. S., Suresh, M. I., Falcón-Gómez, E., Lavado, A. R., & García-Muñoz, L. E. (2022). An Integrated Millimeter-Wave Satellite Radiometer Working at Room-Temperature with High Photon Conversion Efficiency. In Sensors, 22(6), 2400-2413