Low Noise, Large Capacity Photonic Frontend

Visidyne proposes to address the design of a wideband, low noise photonic RF frontend to improve on the trade between a channel's signal-to-noise or capacity and its aggregate channel count. The underlying technology to do this is a photonic parametricamplifier, where an optical carrier is linearly deviated over a large phase angle with a modulation index approaching unity, and powered by a laser diode. Key to the success of the effort will be to extend Visidyne's demonstrated capabilities of linear phase recovery of the modulated carrier from the MHz domain into the GHz region. This step is expected to be aided by the recent availability ofefficient laser diodes and modulators with greatly improved performance in terms of their gain-bandwidth product and from faster electronic signal processors.RF frontends, that have low noise figures and at the same time, because of their linear response and low intermodulation distortion are essential when a jumble of widely varying (in amplitude) signals need to be transmitted as is for example the case indense spectrum environments for cellular phones and secure military communication links.