Freedom Photonics offers design, micro and nano fabrication and testing in support of your research and development needs. We have extensive prototyping capabilities, enabled by our vast experience and access to the state-of-the-art National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN) facilities.

Dr. Jonathon S. Barton

Dr. Barton leads the research and development efforts of Freedom Photonics related to the development of novel coherent and digital communications integrated optical transmitters and transceivers in Indium Phosphide. He is actively involved in the photonic chip design, pilot production and prototype development. He serves as a Principal Investigator for numerous SBIR programs as well as one STTR program.

Dr. Barton has 12 years of experience in working with integrated photonics, spanning over modeling, design, fabrication, testing and packaging of photonic integrated circuits.

Prior to co-founding Freedom Photonics LLC in January 2005, Dr. Barton worked for Agility Communications Inc., a start-up company recently acquired by JDSU Inc., which pioneered monolithically integrated widely-tunable SGDBR based lasers and transmitters. Dr. Barton performed a number of duties at Agility, including device modeling and design, fabrication process development, anti-reflection coating process development and device packaging and testing.

During the time spent at UCSB, Dr. Barton has designed and developed the world’s first C-band tunable monolithically integrated Mach-Zehnder transmitter in Indium Phosphide and photocurrent driven wavelength converters, operating at 40 Gbps. He served as assistant Project Scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was responsible for a $500,000 program on monolithically integrated indium-phosphide chips for all-optical signal regeneration (3R), funded through DARPA’s Chip-Scale WDM program. Prior to his work at UCSB, in 1998, Dr. Barton worked at Sandia National Laboratories on the reliability testing of radiation-hardened VCSELs.

Dr. Barton has co-authored over seventy five papers on tunable lasers and photonic integrated circuits, and has given numerous invited and contributed talks at various international conferences. Dr. Barton has extensive experience with modeling, design, fabrication, testing and packaging of photonic integrated circuits.

 Dr. Leif A. Johansson

Dr. Johansson is actively involved with the research and development efforts geared towards novel integrated Indium Phosphide coherent optical transmitters and receivers at Freedom Photonics. Dr. Johansson is in charge of the coherent receiver product line and overall subsystem design. Additionally, he is actively involved with seeking new business opportunities in diverse markets within Freedom’s scope of competence.

Dr. Leif Johansson brings to our team a world-class, 15 year expertise related for radio-frequency photonics, analog optical communications, radio over fiber systems and advanced modulation format optical communications.

Prior to his work at Freedom Photonics, Dr. Johansson was responsible for several DARPA funded programs in the arena of RF photonics at the University of California ,Santa Barbara. Dr. Johansson joined UCSB in 2002 as a project scientist, and has since been actively involved in defining new areas of research in this area, while gaining firsthand experience in planning, budgeting, and oversight of execution of new and ongoing research projects.

As part of the $6.2M RFLICs program, Dr. Johansson was in charge of managing the development of novel optical transmitters with very high linearity and to develop RF optical links with gain. As part of the DARPA funded PHORFRONT program, he was in charge of defining the technical goals of the program, and then of the full program execution and leadership of the diverse team of university and industrial partners in both photonics and electronics. At the same time, he has was working with Agility Communications as a consultant, evaluating Agility’s new device concepts, in particular relating to the analog communications. Dr. Johansson has authored or co-authored over 100 publications in the areas of RF photonics and integrated photonic circuits.

Dr. Milan L. Mashanovitch

Dr. Mashanovitch is actively involved with the photonic integrated circuit technology and product development at Freedom Photonics. He is the principal investigator on numerous projects. Dr. Mashanovitch is actively involved in seeking new business opportunities in diverse markets within Freedom’s scope of competence. He currently teaches a semiconductor laser design graduate level class at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Dr. Mashanovitch brings to the team a diverse engineering background, including more than 12 years of experience in working with integrated photonics, spanning over modeling, design, fabrication, testing and packaging of photonic integrated circuits.

Prior to co-founding Freedom Photonics LLC, Dr. Mashanovitch designed the world’s first C-band tunable wavelength converter operating at 10 Gbps, and more recently at 40 Gbps. Upon obtaining his Ph.D., he served as an assistant Project Scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was responsible for a $1.8 million research program on monolithically integrated InP chips for optical routing and switching, one of the major components DARPA’s Data-in-Optical Domain program.

While working on these functionally complex photonic integrated circuits, Dr. Mashanovitch acquired direct experience in planning, budgeting, and oversight of execution of new and ongoing research projects, as well as management and planning of the research projects’ resources for timely execution of research tasks and goals. In addition, Dr. Mashanovitch was in charge of photonic device outsourced manufacturing and coordination of related efforts with other industrial and government research team members and partners.

Dr. Mashanovitch also worked as an engineer at the Lucent Technologies Netherlands in the wireless IP hardware networking group, as well as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, in the Planetary Science Division. Dr. Mashanovitch has coauthored over seventy papers on photonic integrated circuit technologies and packet switching, and has given numerous invited and contributed talks at peer-reviewed international conferences. He has taught semiconductor laser graduate level courses at UCSB as an adjunct professor, and is one of the authors of the “Diode Lasers and Photonic Integrated Circuits” textbook, to be published by John Wiley and Sons in 2011.