High capacity optical interconnects for phased array beamformers

Two new concepts for overcoming the optical interconnect losses in highly dense multibeam photonics-based beamforming networks are presented. The first is the use of erbium-doped fiber amplifiers as power boosters at the transmitters, and the second is the use of external modulation techniques at the laser transmitters. Using these concepts, results show that a system noise figure of 3.5 db and a spurious-free dynamic range of 134 dB·Hz^4/5 can be attained for a wideband phased array which can yield around 1000 independent and simultaneous antenna beams