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Photonic Bandwidth Compression for Instantaneous Wideband A/D Conversion (PHOBIAC)
Program Manager: Dr. Steve Pappert
The Photonic Bandwidth Compression for Instantaneous Wideband A/D Conversion (PHOBIAC) program will develop revolutionary technologies to enable analog to digital converters (ADCs) with high-resolution and large instantaneous bandwidth, while maintaining power consumption that is commensurate with user community requirements. It is expected that such ADCs would have a dramatic impact on SIGINT capabilities such as direct down-conversion of ultra-high frequency (UHF) through X-band radio frequency (RF) signals. Furthermore, ADCs enabled by PHOBIAC alleviate the current ADC bottleneck in high capacity digital RF communications links by enabling more spectrally efficient wideband waveforms.
This program develops a bandwidth-compressing photonic front end, providing a force multiplier for any available back-end electronic ADCs. PHOBIAC will provide 40x bandwidth multiplication of existing ADCs and support 10 effective number of bits (ENOB) with less than 10 watts of overhead in wall-plug power. By the completion of the program, and with the inclusion of an electronic ADC industry partner, it is expected that electronic ADCs will be available to demonstrate a composite ADC with 10 ENOB and 10 GHz instantaneous bandwidth with a total power consumption less than 40 watts.