Analog Photonic Systems: Features & Techniques to Optimize Performance

Both the scientific and the defense communities wish to receive and process information occupying ever-wider portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. This can often create an analog-to-digital conversion "bottleneck". Analog photonic channelization, linearization, and frequency conversion systems can be designed to alleviate this bottleneck. Moreover, the low loss and dispersion of optical fiber and integrated optical waveguides enables most of the components in a broadband sensing or communication system, including all of the analog-to-digital and digital processing hardware, to be situated many feet or even miles from the antennas or other sensors with almost no performance penalty. This seminar will highlight the advantages and other features of analog photonic systems (including some specific systems that the author has constructed and tested for the US Department of Defense), and will review and explain multiple techniques for optimizing their performance.