Overview

The scientific and the defense communities need to receive and process information occupying ever-wider portions of the electromagnetic (EM) 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 enable 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 webinar will highlight the features and advantages of analog photonic systems, including some specific systems that the author has constructed and tested for the U.S. Department of Defense, and will review and explain multiple techniques for optimizing their performance.

Presenter

Dr. Edward I. Ackerman is VP of research and development at Photonic Systems, Inc. Prior to that he was a microwave photonics engineer at Martin Marietta¹s Electronics Laboratory in Syracuse, New York, where he used low-loss narrowband impedance matching techniques to demonstrate the first amplifierless direct modulation analog optical link with RF gain (+3.7 dB at 900MHz). He was also a member of the Technical Staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he developed high-performance analog photonic links for microwave communications and antenna remoting applications. Dr. Ackerman received his BSEE from Lafayette College and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Drexel University. He has co-authored and co-edited a book and several chapters, as well as more than 70 technical papers on the subject of analog photonic subsystem performance modeling and optimization. Dr. Ackerman is a Fellow of the IEEE and holds eight U.S. patents.