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Field Portable, Low Cost, Fiber-Optic Reflectometer

Award Information
Agency: Department of Defense
Branch: Navy
Contract: N68335-05-C-0293
Agency Tracking Number: N051-021-1736
Amount: $79,906.00
Phase: Phase I
Program: SBIR
Solicitation Topic Code: N05-021
Solicitation Number: 2005.1
Timeline
Solicitation Year: 2005
Award Year: 2005
Award Start Date (Proposal Award Date): 2005-05-11
Award End Date (Contract End Date): 2005-11-11
Small Business Information
65 Willow Springs Lane Suite 204
Goleta, CA 93117
United States
DUNS: 191741292
HUBZone Owned: No
Woman Owned: No
Socially and Economically Disadvantaged: No
Principal Investigator
 Jonathon Barton
 President
 (805) 680-2176
 jbarton@freedomphotonics.com
Business Contact
 Milan Mashanovitch
Title: Director of Technical Development
Phone: (805) 685-8240
Email: mmashanovitch@freedomphotonics.com
Research Institution
N/A
Abstract

We propose to study the feasibility of a highly portable, inexpensive, photonic integrated circuit(PIC) based reflectometer that uses PICs packaged with ruggedized telecom techniques. The proposed reflectometer will be designed around a photonic engine module that contains 2 integrated widely-tunable lasers/transmitters on a single chip, based on the Sampled-Grating DBR laser, and additional reflectometer functions realized on another PIC chip. Both chips will be in the same module, separated by an optical isolator. Particular advantage of the proposed solution is its versatility, allowing different measurement techniques to be implemented with the same hardware. 2 tunable transmitters and the unique reflectometer PIC design allow for direct detection and coherent OTDR approaches to be implemented, as well as different frequency-modulated continuous wave techniques (CFMCW). We believe that these CFMCW techniques could provide a better overall solution to the problem with higher sensitivity and dynamic range. Comparison of the OTDR/CFMCW approaches will be performed in the Phase I of the project. Finally, the solution proposed will be compatible with the fiber optic transceiver built-in-test strategies. The tunable lasers to be part of the reflectometer photonic module could contain optical modulators and would be fully capable of high performance data transmission.

* Information listed above is at the time of submission. *

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