Integrated Photonics for RF Sensing Applications

Photonic technologies continue to make tremendous strides as advanced sensors in the automotive, commerce, medical, telecommunications and mil/aerospace markets [1,2,3]. Research and development in photonics is also growing on a global scale and will have an impact on the next of segment of the economic growth integral to advances in 5G and adaptive/reconfigurable mesh information networks [4,5,6]. It is critical to note that to take full advantage of what photonic technologies have to offer, they must achieve higher levels of integration of their key components and further merge efficiently with mainstream semiconductor technologies in order to be most effective as more and more data needs to be represented with very low latency. This paper delves into the trends being established globally in integrated photonics and addresses the some of the challenges required to improve radio frequency (RF) sensing that are likely to be common across mil/aerospace and commercial applications.