Opto-Electronic Oscillators

Professor Prakash Koonath
Senior Engineer, OE Waves Inc.

Thursday, May 21, 2009 at 3:00pm
Engr IV Room 67-124

Abstract
Oscillators are ubiquitous in their applications: ranging from commonly used wristwatches to the most advanced radar communication equipments. An important metric of performance for an oscillator is its spectral purity, which is directly related to the energy storage time in the oscillator circuit. Beyond a few Giga Hz, energy storage time of microwave storage elements degrade drastically, making it difficult to devise high quality oscillators. Opto-Electronic Oscillators (OEO) represent an architecture to generate microwave/millimeter wave signals using optical storage elements. Signals with high spectral quality is achievable at frequencies ranging from a few 100 MHz to beyond 100 GHz. The talk will explore some of the OEO architectures that have been investigated in the past decade or so to generate low noise microwave signals.

Biography
Prakash Koonath received his Ph.D in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in 2001. His graduate work involved the realization of polarization insensitive quantum well optical amplifiers and semiconductor lasers based on III-V materials. During 2002-2007, he was a post doctoral researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he worked on 3-D monolithic integration of photonic and electronic devices and the investigation of nonlinear optical phenomena in Silicon. He is currently a Senior Engineer at OE Waves Inc, located in Pasadena, and works on the design and characterization of low noise opto-electronic oscillators.