Patent — available for licensing
Cascaded Offset Optical Modulator
A NASA invention available to explore as a licensing opportunity.
About this technology
Overview
Innovators at the NASA Glenn Research Center have developed the Cascaded Offset Optical Modulator, an electro-optic subsystem used to interface a binary output Software Defined Radio (SDR) to an optical transmission system. Traditionally, this task is accomplished through the use of a Mach Zehnder Modulator (MZM), a primarily analog component. In order to generate a high-fidelity optical signal, the input electrical signal must be of equally high fidelity, which is a difficult task due to the competing requirements of the digital components and the analog modulator. The digital components required to generate the waveform contain non-idealities which degrade the extinction ratio (ER) of the optical signal. The Cascaded Offset Optical Modulator corrects these non-idealities in the electro-optic subsystem during modulation by relieving the SDR of the extreme fidelity requirements imposed by the optical modulator. This approach is valid in any optical transmission system that requires high fidelity binary pulses without a complex component.