90 Degree Optical Hybrid

Six-port hybrid devices have been used for microwave and millimeter-wave detection systems since the mid-1990s and are a key component for coherent receivers. In principle, the six-port device consists of linear dividers and combiners interconnected in such a way that four different vectorial additions of a reference signal (LO) and the signal to be detected are obtained. The levels of the four output signals are detected by balanced receivers. By applying suitable baseband signal processing algorithms, the amplitude and phase of the unknown signal can be determined.