A SBIR Phase I contract was awarded to Physical Sciences in August, 2023 for $139,999.0 USD from the U.S. Department of Defense and United States Navy.
We propose the development of Active Low-Voltage Modulators (ALVM) based on the thin film lithium niobate (TFLN) photonic-integrated circuit (PIC) platform to realize enhanced radio-frequency (RF) links that are compact, efficient, and can be scalably manufactured using a commercial wafer-scale production capability. The proposed modulator design combines a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) with an integrated pair of low-biased Mach-Zender interferometers (MZIs) in a push-pull configuration to enable RF-photonic links with low noise figure (NF) and high bandwidth.