Millimeter-wave Optical Dense Multiplexing (MODM)

"The demand for broadband communications continues to proliferate throughout both the military and commercial sectors. Configurations employing wireless links between platforms represent one subset of the communications space, and fill the need wherehardwired connections are impractical. Because of the spectral congestion within the lower frequency bands, exploitation of the millimeter wave (mm-wave) band is of great interest. At the same time, the use of mm-wave carriers enables the transmission ofhigh-data-rate information. Photera Technologies, in partnership with the University of California, San Diego, proposes a photonic mm-wave modulator/demodulator system which promises to meet these demands. Aptly named, Millimeter-wave Optical DenseMultiplexing (MODM), this technology marries a low-phase-noise photonic mm-wave generator with an opto-electronic mixer to provide the backbone of a broadband wireless communications network. The resulting high-purity generation of mm-wave signals willyield efficient modulation formats and encoding techniques while simultaneously providing densely multiplexed configurations in a spectrally efficient architecture. The development of the MODM technology will have a profound impact on the military andcommercial marketplaces. This technology will result in the union of several advantageous technologies; namely, WDM, low-noise photonic mm-wave generation, spectrally-efficient modulation (eg. PSK), secu