TITLE:

Photonic technology for low size weight and power microwave communications applications

DATE:

Friday, May 1st, 2015

TIME:

3:30 PM

LOCATION:

GMCS 214

SPEAKER:

Dr. James Adleman. Photonics Group at SPAWAR

ABSTRACT:

The Advanced Photonic Technologies group at SSC Pacific works to develop and transition next generation photonic technology to provide the fleet. This talk will discuss efforts at SSC PAC to design and implement RF photonics systems to enable channelization, spectrum analysis, and agile RF-IF down conversion of microwave signals, as well as the development of novel optoelectronic devices and materials for low power and high bandwidth analog and digital communications.

Due to rapid growth in the capability of microwave and millimeter wave transceivers, real time awareness and signal analysis across large areas of the electromagnetic spectrum (e.g. 2-40 GHz) has become vital to both commercial and defense applications. The many THz of useful bandwidth available in optical waveguides positions RF photonics as a vital technique for radio communication and spectrum analysis in this frequency domain. A novel microwave/millimeter-wave channelizer will be presented based on a RF photonic front-end employing parametric wavelength multicasting and comb generation.

This new technology enables a contiguous bank of channelized coherent I/Q IF signal covering extremely wide RF instantaneous bandwidth. Additionally, a new design for a wide band tunable downconverting RF link from C to Ka band using injection locking of commercial DFBs will be described. The Injection locked laser design relaxes tuning range requirement of RF local oscillator, and provides high optical power for efficient RF-IF conversion while minimizing degradation to link sensitivity due to phase noise.

We will discuss sensitivity and dynamic range performance of these systems as well as practical implementation issues such as phase stability and laser locking bandwidth. We will present implementation of photonic integrated circuit filters in low loss SiO2 based platform to perform very low size weight and power spectrum analysis, with the goal enabling wideband spectrum monitoring and awareness in a man portable device. Finally, we will present initial work on optoelectronic tunneling transistor devices using graphene and other two dimensional lattice materials to create broadband infrared sources for chip scale photonic applications.

HOST:

Dr. Christopher Curtis

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