Nanophotonics and Optical MEMS: Building All-Optical Satellites
- Paper number
IAC-06-D1.2.06
- Author
Mr. Rubén Salvador Edo, Polytechnics University of Valencia, Spain
- Year
2006
- Abstract
The current trend in satellites design is to develop smaller and smarter satellites in order to obtain high performance communications systems with complex on board digital processing. They are light and cheaper to launch, but consequently they have less shielding, less redundancy and less space radiation resistance since high integrated electronics implies low voltages. The radiation hazards to electronics in space mean one of the main problems in high performance satellites, since they could entail fatal failure of the satellite, even the destruction of electronic components. My proposal is using emergent technologies like nanophotonics for the signal processing subsystem, and optical MEMS for the optical beamforming in the space communications subsystem, since these technologies solve the radiation hazards and can be directly interfaced by photonic methods. The advantages of nanophotonics with regard to electronics are their higher information transmission capacity, their reduced weigh, their very low power consumption and their extremely reduced susceptibility to space radiation. These high performances are due to the lightwave is guided by photonic crystals in nanophotonic devices. Photonic crystals are nanostructured materials (like porous silicon) which only propagate a specific wavelength, strongly attenuating the rest of the electromagnetic radiation. In addition, recent researches suggest using quantum dots to implement teleportation of quantum information (qubit) via single photons, which could lead to a future high performance quantum memory. On the other hand, we can implement adaptive micro-optic devices like MEM-DM (micro-electro-mechanical Deformable Mirrors) for free space optical telecommunications (for satellite to satellite communications or satellite to earth communications). This device is a matrix of high quality surface mirrors that can be implemented using standard surface silicon micromachining. That means that,in a single silicon substrate, we can integrate the telecommunications transceiver (MEM-DM), the high speed and reliable signal processor (nanophotonics) and additional electronics: all of them manufactured with standard CMOS processes.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
IAC-06-D1.2.06.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).
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