PHASE SENSITIVE INNOVATIONS INC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: A19-079
PHASE SENSITIVE INNOVATIONS INC — SBIR Phase II award from Department of Defense.
Phase II SBIR prototype / development signal
- Phase II is where Department of Defense funds deeper R&D after feasibility. Incumbents with Phase II history are serious competitors on adjacent topics.
- Use this award as past-performance context and to map customer organizations for STRATFI/TACFI-style transition planning.
- Obligated amount $749,995 is consistent with substantial Phase II-scale effort; compare to related awards from the same agency.
- Topic code A19-079 links this award to a solicitation family — search the same topic stem for incumbents and recompete timing.
- Amount
- $749,995
- Agency
- Department of Defense · Army
- Program / Phase
- SBIR · Phase II
- Topic
- A19-079
- Solicitation
- 19.1
- NAICS
- —
- Place of performance
- DE
- Period
- 2020-11-16 → 2022-04-22
Description
Software defined radios (SDRs) have redefined many areas of modern electronics, from enabling reconfigurable communications to rapid prototyping of new electronic support concepts. However, current implementations of SDRs are limited by the underlying electronic approaches used to realize them. Herein, we describe a novel photonically-enabled SDR (PESDR) that utilized the inherently broadband nature of signal generation, mixing, and routing in optics to enable extremely broadband SDRs with wide frequency tunability and deployment flexibility. Using optimized versions of optical modulators and photodiodes, first developed for the telecommunications industry, efficient conversion to and from the optical domain is possible and optical fiber and photonic integrated circuit routing provides low-loss, low-SWaP form factors for SDR realization. Using experimentally-validated injection locking techniques, PSI has been able to realize tunable optical paired sources (TOPS) that lock two laser cavities with a precise frequency offset and replicate linewidth and noise between the two lasers. Thus, when these two lasers, or any modulated signals deriving from these lasers, are beat together on a photodiode, a precise sub-1Hz linewidth tone is generated in the electrical domain. These locked lasers can then form the basis for a widely-tunable, software-defined transmit and receive channels that can be modulated, routed, and phased optically. The proposed effort leverages over $15M in past and current DoD applied research programs, which have already proven most of the critical concepts. In this proposal, we lay out a plan to implement these already proven PESDR concepts in an integrated format more suitable for deployment.