Broadband continuously tunable microwave photonic delay line based on cascaded silicon microrings

We present a novel broadband continuously tunable microwave photonic delay line consisting of a modulator, a four-stage microring resonator delay line, a tunable optical bandpass filter, and a photodetector. Unlike the traditional microring delay lines working at the on-resonant wavelength, the microring resonators in our chip work at the anti-resonant wavelengths, leading to a large delay bandwidth and a small delay ripple. The experimental results show that relative group delay can be continuously tuned from 0 to 160 ps for microwave frequencies in the range of 0 to 16 GHz. The delay ripple is less than 6.2 ps. These results represent an important step towards the realization of integrated continuously tunable delay lines demanded in broadband microwave phased array antennas.