PAGE CONTENTS
Objectives
The objective of the activity is to design, manufacture, and test an Engineering Model of an Electro-Photonic Frequency Converter for telecommunications payloads.
Challenges
Technical challenges of the project are designing a compact and integrated version of the frequency converter, fabricating high performance PIC and integrating this PIC into a PCB.
System Architecture
Optical sub-sampling together with LO and RF mixing is the baseline architecture for the project. Each signal is applied to the MZM arms and then mixing products are converted back to the electrical signal in the PD.
Plan
During the project multiple milestones are envisioned. Before PDR, review on the technical approaches will be done. Development and testing plan are before DDR. Then, final report follows the manufacturing and testing.
Current Status
This project investigates the possibility of providing an optical frequency converter based in integrated photonic circuit (PIC). In this project two main photonics platforms are investigated; Silicon photonics and Heterogeneous integration of InP-on-Silicon photonics. It comes in contrast that indeed integrated circuit provides more compact, energy efficient and low mass solution for the optical microwave applications. Follow up project proposal is under preparation to ESA.
