HRL Laboratories LLC will demonstrate a programmable radio-frequency photonic filter with a $1.5 million award from DARPA for its Phaser (photonic analog signal-processing engines with reconfigurability) program.

The filter, the Phaser "unit cell" -- will serve as a building block for higher-order filters in the form of a photonic integrated circuit (PIC). The Phaser PIC will enable rapidly reconfigurable analog filtering and support in addition to a high dynamic range in a variety of ultrawideband microwave receivers.

The Phaser program was established to address the Department of Defense's need for ultrawideband signal-processing capabilities that will lead to reductions in the size, weight and power consumption of the processor.

"The HRL unit cell will be composed of tunable microresonators that are optically coupled to an underlying mesh of integrated silica waveguides," said Willie Ng, manager of HRL's photonics department. "This will allow arraying in two dimensions so that radio-frequency signals modulated onto optical carriers can be channeled into narrow 'passbands' via the implementation of cascaded unit cells."

HRL said it will demonstrate a chip-scale, high-resolution frequency channelization capability as its part of Phaser.

HRL, based in Malibu, is a corporate R&D laboratory owned by The Boeing Co. and General Motors.

For more information, visit: hrl.com