Field Portable, Low Cost, Fiber-Optic Reflectometer

We propose to study the feasibility of a highly portable, inexpensive, photonic integrated circuit(PIC) based reflectometer that uses PICs packaged with ruggedized telecom techniques. The proposed reflectometer will be designed around a photonic engine module that contains 2 integrated widely-tunable lasers/transmitters on a single chip, based on the Sampled-Grating DBR laser, and additional reflectometer functions realized on another PIC chip. Both chips will be in the same module, separated by an optical isolator. Particular advantage of the proposed solution is its versatility, allowing different measurement techniques to be implemented with the same hardware. 2 tunable transmitters and the unique reflectometer PIC design allow for direct detection and coherent OTDR approaches to be implemented, as well as different frequency-modulated continuous wave techniques (CFMCW). We believe that these CFMCW techniques could provide a better overall solution to the problem with higher sensitivity and dynamic range. Comparison of the OTDR/CFMCW approaches will be performed in the Phase I of the project. Finally, the solution proposed will be compatible with the fiber optic transceiver built-in-test strategies. The tunable lasers to be part of the reflectometer photonic module could contain optical modulators and would be fully capable of high performance data transmission.