Summary
Electronic oscillators lie at the heart of virtually all microelectronic systems, generating the periodic clock signals used in digital electronics and the precise frequencies that enable radar and radio frequency (RF) communications.
While an ideal oscillator provides a tone at a singular frequency, component imperfections and coupling to the environment degrade the spectral purity of real-world sources. These impairments, broadly quantified as phase noise, ultimately limit the performance of many military and commercial RF systems.
The Generating RF with Photonic Oscillators for Low Noise (GRYPHON) program seeks to develop compact microwave frequency oscillators with extremely low phase noise to enable advanced sensing and communication applications. In the last decade, major advances in oscillator performance have been realized using optical techniques to synthesize high-fidelity microwave signals.
Such oscillators employ optical frequency division to reach world-record phase noise levels. The solutions demonstrated to date, however, have sacrificed other important attributes in pursuit of spectral purity. Such trade-offs are problematic, because module size, cost, tunability, and environmental sensitivity are also critical factors that determine the applicability of microwave sources to commercial and military systems.
GRYPHON will leverage recent developments in nonlinear photonics and photonic-electronic integration to develop microwave sources with noise performance that meets or exceeds that of the best discrete oscillator modules, yet occupy a compact volume typical of far noisier chip-scale voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs).
Moreover, by program end, GRYPHON microwave sources will operate as synthesizers with the ability to tune to any frequency from 1 to 40+ GHz during operation. This combination of features is unprecedented in today’s state of the art, and will establish a new regime of source technology that is expected to transform the types and capabilities of military and commercial radar and communication systems.