Current Areas of Research

High Dynamic Range RF/Photonic Links

• Analog fiber-optic links are attractive in radar front end applications as a replacement for coaxial cable.
• Poor SFDR severely limits the radar’s ability to resolve targets immersed in background noise and/or interference.
• Linearization techniques can barely push the link SFDR over 70dB for a 500MHz information bandwidth. In many critical defense applications an SFDR of 90dB or higher is required.
  
• We are investigating linear coherent PM fiber optic links that are able to achieve over 90dB dynamic range over a 500MHz bandwidth.

Optical Link Testing Setup

Integrated Photonic Frequency Mixer

• Electronic frequency mixers are an indispensable building block of many RF/microwave systems.
• State-of-the-art electronic mixers are limited by their restricted dynamic ranges and large insertion losses.
• The development of the OPLL linear phase modulator motivates one to re-examine this old, but more profound problem of electronic frequency mixers.

Tunable Microchip Laser

Tunable Microchip Laser Experimental Setup