| Microwave photonics is a multi-disciplinary area that studies the interactions between microwave signals and optical signals. As one of the key elements, direct optical control of microwave semiconductor devices has been an area of growing interest since 1980's. They can be widely used in picosecond photoconductive switch, phase shifter, attenuator, high-speed sampling, gain control of amplifier and so on.; Specifically, optically controlled microstrip discontinuities devices fabricated on semiconductor substrates have wide-ranging applications due to their simple fabrication, easy integration with other passive and active microwave devices.; In this dissertation, a systematic work has been done to analyze the transmission characteristics and applications of optically controlled microstrip single gap and interdigitated gap devices on high resistivity silicon (HRS) wafer. Detailed simulations, experiments and the relative equivalent circuit models for these gap structures are presented.; When illuminated on the surface of the microstrip single gaps, the S 12 amplitude of this gap increases linearly as the optical illumination increasing, which is a good potential application for digital controllable attenuator. The change of the S12 amplitude is mainly due to the imaginary permittivity change of the HRS substrates. The equivalent circuit model is established to explain the amplitude and phase changed. The equivalent resistors have been calculated according to the excess carrier concentration profile after illumination, which match well with the experimental results.; In the analysis of optically controlled microstrip interdigitated gaps, an equivalent circuit model for simple interdigitated gap is obtained. As far as we know, this is the first report of optically controlled microstrip interdigitated gap equivalent circuit model. The amplitude and phase changes of interdigitated gaps under different illumination powers are calculated with this equivalent circuit model, which basically agree with the experimental results. Meanwhile, the effect on the transmission characteristics from the gap dimensions is also discussed. Finally a novel gap structure is described for optically controlled phase shifter application, whose transmission characteristics have nearly zero amplitude change and no less than 27 degrees phase change under different illumination powers when the transmission signal frequency is about 1.8 to 2.5GHz. Some detailed experimental results of this gap are presented in Chapter 5.; Some future work is also suggested based on the study in this dissertation. |
