Development of Advanced Radar Technologies for Missile Defense

We are pleased to propose a program to design and to build an innovative, high performance optical time delay unit (TDU) for phased array antennas. In order to find the optimum choice of implementation, we examined techniques such as MEMs optical cross connect switches, integrated optic switch arrays, fiber Bragg gratings and LCDs. We have achieved our goals of low loss, fast tuning, small size and low weight with a heterogeneous baseline where we use wavelength selective routing employing a Mach Zehnder Interferometer (MZI) to add fiber lengths for large values of delay, and we use dispersive delay fiber to add fine delay adjustments. The key enabling component is a fast tuning optically broadband laser diode. The laser has the additional capability to create multiple tunable simultaneous wavelengths. This allows the time delay unit to have the capability for multiple simultaneous beams with negligible size, weight and power increase compared to the single beam operation.