High-speed high-isolation 2 × 2 fiber-optic switch for wideband radar photonic beamforming controls

A new high-performance 2 × 2 fiber-optic switch is designed and demonstrated for wideband radar photonic beamforming controls. The switch deploys two bulk acoustooptic deflectors (AODs) in an imaging free-space symmetric optical design that exploits image inversion control via a Dove prism to form a 2 × 2 fully reversible low crosstalk noise high-speed switching structure. Experiments at the 1550-nm test wavelength show the switch to handle 0.5-W level optical input powers, < 2.2-μs switching time, < 2.6-dB fiber-to-fiber optical loss, better than 56-dB optical crosstalk levels, and < 0.2-dB polarization-dependent loss (PDL).