Sub-THz wireless transmission based on graphene-integrated optoelectronic mixer
Alberto Montanaro, Giulia Piccinini, Vaidotas Mišeikis, Vito Sorianello, Marco Angelo Giambra, Stefano Soresi, Luca Giorgi, A. D’Errico, Kenji Watanabe, Takashi Taniguchi, Sergio Pezzini, Camilla Coletti, M. Romagnoli
Abstract
Abstract Optoelectronics is a valuable solution to scale up wireless links frequency to sub-THz in the next generation antenna systems and networks. Here, we propose a low-power consumption, small footprint building block for 6 G and 5 G new radio wireless transmission allowing broadband capacity (e.g., 10–100 Gb/s per link and beyond). We demonstrate a wireless datalink based on graphene, reaching setup limited sub-THz carrier frequency and multi-Gbit/s data rate. Our device consists of a graphene-based integrated optoelectronic mixer capable of mixing an optically generated reference oscillator approaching 100 GHz, with a baseband electrical signal. We report >96 GHz optoelectronic bandwidth and −44 dB upconversion efficiency with a footprint significantly smaller than those of state-of-the-art photonic transmitters (i.e., <0.1 mm 2 ). These results are enabled by an integrated-photonic technology based on wafer-scale high-mobility graphene and pave the way towards the development of optoelectronics-based arrayed-antennas for millimeter-wave technology.