Microwaves and photonics

Microwave “circuit” design was a mature field in the 50’s that has fallen into obsolescence due to Monolithic Integrated Microwave Circuit (MMIC) technology. Today, fabrication technology has advanced to a point that optical devices a few wavelengths in size can be fabricated. The radiation losses of these structures can be low enough to allow filter band widths of 10’s of GHz, adequate for high bit-rate communications technology. Hence it behooves us to rethink optical circuit design along the lines of microwave circuit design. Obsolescence is not a threat, since optical devices will never become smaller than one wavelength. This talk gives a discussion of the issues raised in this outline.