In this project the design, fabrication and test of an on-chip optical beam forming network (OBFN) will be carried out. The chip would be part of a multiple beam former, i.e., a photonic microsystem which will be applied in phased array antennas for satellites, aircraft and terrestrial 5G base stations. The OBFN will be of the Blass matrix type with 144 antenna ports and 36 beam ports. The OBFN chip will contain tunable Optical Ring Resonators (ORR) which act as true time delays (TTD) and enable broadband beamforming and multiple-beaming. In perspective, the optical chip will be integrated with InP lasers for converting the receiving antenna signals into optical beams as input to the OBFN and InP photodetectors to convert the OBFN output optical signals into RF driving signals for the transmitting antennas. In this project, the use of liquid crystal (LC) technology for tuning of the ORRs will be researched for the first time, to replace conventional thermo-optic tuning based on heaters which cause high dissipation and thermal crosstalk. A significant innovation of this project is related to the power dissipation of the OBFN which will be reduced by 99%. The chip designed by the proponent group will be manufactured by the photonic foundry LioniX Int. BV (NL), in TriPleX (Si3N4/SiO2) technology in the frame of an European collaboration. TriPleX technology based integrated optical waveguides, which is CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) compatible, and that will be used to make the ORR have extremely low propagation losses (
