Thin Film Lithium Niobate Modulators for Attritable Platform Electronic Support Imaging Receivers

The advent of high frequency electronics for consumer and other applications is driving ever more sophisticated threats at frequencies into the high microwave and millimeter-wave regime. These increasingly high frequency threats with ever increasing instantaneous bandwidths are becoming untenable to address with traditional electronic warfare/support (EW/ES) approaches.  These issues become particularly difficult to address on new classes of attritable platforms designed for forward operation, where size, weight, power consumption, and cost are of particular concern. Recently, PSI has developed novel ES receivers based on broadband conversion to and processing in the optical domain, where lightweight optical fibers and photonic chips can be used to route and process very broadband signals in significantly lower SWaP profiles. New classes of materials in the form of thin film lithium niobate on insulators, which provide significant enhancements in the conversion efficiency and overall performance of these receivers, are already being evaluated for other applications. Under the effort proposed herein, PSI will specifically evaluate the use of these materials for ES cueing and digitizing receivers in attritable platforms.  Specifically, PSI will evaluate the cost, size, weight, and power benefits that will arise from these receivers over traditional approaches and derive a notional concept of operations that are enabled by these benefits.  Specification flow down will be derived from these CONOPs and a set of subsystem specifications, focusing on the benefits that can be achieved by thin film lithium niobate modulators will be derived.