Phase Sensitive Innovations (PSI) specializes in the design, fabrication, and manufacture of photonic devices and their integration into numerous RF systems. Applications include: 5G and B5G wireless communications, High bandwidth RF-over-fiber, high fidelity RF signal generation, wide bandwidth waveform transmission, antenna remoting, security scanning and screening, RF surveillance, and phased array antenna systems for real-time microwave, millimeter-wave, and THz-imaging
PSI has developed advanced electro-optic (EO) modulators in thin-film lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI) that have operated up to 500 GHz. In addition, PSI has demonstrated a 0.875 Volt, half-wave voltage device. With these two record setting modulators, PSI is a leading company in the development of LNOI modulators that include phase only, intensity modulated, and single sideband suppressed carrier (S3C) devices. These devices offer extremely high EO conversion efficiency, broad operational bandwidth and inherent superior material properties such as high optical power handling capability and high linearity make the PSI LNOI modulators ideal for a wide range of analog photonic and 5G applications.
Also, PSI has a dedicated 3,000+ cleanroom specifically for LNOI devices as well as Silicon Nitride and Silicon photonic devices with a specialization in their hybrid integration into chip-scale systems.
PSI’s mmW imaging technology is based on an optical up-conversion technology that converts an incoming RF or mmW signal up to the optical domain where it is spatially processed using a conventional optical system, which happens at the speed of light! Key to this approach is the ability to up-convert all RF signals using an analog process that preserves spatial coherence across the entire antenna array. In the system shown in Figure 1, each element in the antenna array is connected to one of PSI’s optical phase modulators that serves to up-convert all received RF wavefronts, in this case A and B. Each up-converted signal propagates through an optical fiber and is routed to a common bundle that is fed to an optical processor, which forms an image of the RF scene in the optical domain. This unique technology is the first ever demonstrated imaging phased array RF system that has no inherent limit on beam bandwidth product. Moreover, once imaged each up-converted signal is spatially mapped to a different/unique point, which when used with a CCD camera produces a real-time image or, in the case of a photo-detectors each original RF signal can be fully recovered and immediately down-converted to an intermediate frequency (IF) for direct input into a digital processing system.
Applications for PSI’s up-conversion technology include high bandwidth communications such as 5G and B5G, Radar, satellite-communications (SATCOM), as well as imaging in security, defense, and industrial settings.
