COMPANY PROFILE

Photonic Systems, Inc. (PSI) provides comprehensive microwave photonics research, engineering services, and products. With decades of collective RF and photonic component and system experience, PSI brings best-in-class solutions to customers with a wide range of applications in defense, communications, radio astronomy, research and government.

Members of PSI’s staff are among the principal contributors that established the field of microwave and radio frequency (RF) photonics technology.  PSI has designed and developed high performance fiber-optic systems that include lasers, external modulators, driver amplifiers, bias control, linearization techniques, doped-fiber or semiconductor optical amplifiers, optical filters, high sensitivity receivers, temperature control, wideband power amplifiers, noise compensation circuits, and adaptive load compensators.

PSI staff members have quite literally written the books in their respective areas and have produced more than 200 technical publications on these topics as well as having received international recognition for their contributions to the analysis, design and implementation of optical links and related topics.  Principal accomplishments of PSI personnel include:

Theoretical basis for analog link design.

Over the past ten years, the team now at PSI applied incremental modeling to develop a rigorous link model that is valid for virtually all types of analog links: direct and external modulation, RF matching at the input and output, effects of amplifiers – both electrical and optical - and the effects of laser or modulator bias.  The models we developed have been widely adopted by the analog photonics community.

First amplifier-free links with positive intrinsic gain.

PSI personnel demonstrated the first external and direct modulation links without amplifiers that had power gain.  For eight years PSI personnel held the record for an external modulation link with broad bandwidth gain, and still hold the records for broad bandwidth direct and external modulation gain as well as narrow bandwidth direct and external modulation link gain.

Lowest noise figure in an amplifier-free link.

Over the years PSI personnel have set several records for the lowest noise figure and presently hold the record for the lowest noise figure without an amplifier: from 2.5 dB at 130 MHz to 5.7 dB at 12 GHz.   Further analysis by PSI personnel established the limits on link noise figure and its dependence on link gain.

Highest dynamic range for an analog link.

PSI currently holds the record for the analog optical link with the highest demonstrated SFDR to date -132 dB×Hz4/5 at ~ 500 MHz in a sub-octave bandwidth.