Minimalist terahertz wireless transceiver in integrated photonics

Photonics-assisted wireless communication provides a powerful pathway for next-generation infrastructures, offering ultra-wide bandwidth and high spectral agility. Despite extensive research and commercial adoption of photonics-assisted schemes such as radio-over-fiber in base station scenarios, their implementation in space-constrained and power-sensitive end devices remains highly challenging. The main obstacles arise from complex transceiver architectures, as mitigating effects of drift and jitter in carriers necessitates either high-purity sources or complex digital signal processing (DSP). Here, we propose a minimalist integrated photonics-assisted terahertz wireless transceiver solution tailored for lightweight systems. By employing residual carrier modulation and injection locking, we achieve a streamlined architecture using solely off-the-shelf 4 MHz linewidth distributed feedback laser chips and a single photodetector receiver, which supports 144 Gbps high-speed transmission at sub-terahertz frequency, meanwhile operating in a DSP-free regime for carrier recovery. The system also incorporates on-chip modulator and photodiode, enabling higher-level system integration. Eliminating the long-standing hardware burden and DSP overhead, the proposed scheme paves the way for lightweight, massive adoption of high-performance photonics-assisted wireless transceivers in end devices for ubiquitous access.