There has been a breakthrough in wireless communication technology which is designed for future mobile networks like 5G's successor as well as other networks. Current technologies struggle to cover such a broad spectrum of operation across wider frequency ranges from microwave to terahertz. The researchers presented a solution to extend the capabilities of these technologies using a thin-film lithium niobate photonic system which enables adaptive wireless communication over a high amount of bandwidth, more than 100 GHz.
Limitations of the current communication technologies include narrow bandwidth, high noise and lacks of any integration which make it difficult to achieve a compact, wideband and reconfigurable communication hardware. More limitations include high complexity, high cost, coherence and noise issues in optical signal generation, high drive voltages and loss in modulators. Overall, many more things that make them limited but the things I mentioned are mainly only part of their current limitations.
To address the limitations of the current electrical and photonic wireless technologies, researchers developed a fully integrated photonic wireless system that is based on Thin-Film Lithium Niobate or TFLN. This offers greater advantages in bandwidth, noise performance and integration. The system uses a novel optoelectronic oscillator built on TFLN to generate carrier and local oscillator signals across a large frequency range of 0.5 GHz to 115GHz, it also offers high frequency stability and low phase noise. TFLN modulators are also low-loss, high bandwitch, and outperform silicon and bulk lithium niobate modulators. The system demonstrates wireless data transmission across nine consecutive frequency bands, which achieves a data rate of over 100 Gbps, which is not possible with the current systems because of their narrowband nature.
Tao, Z., et al. Data for "ultrabroadband On-chip Photonics for Full-spectrum Wireless Communications". Versions v1, Zenodo, July 2025, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15876445.