Many new and exciting avionic sensing and surveillance systems are demanding more and more bandwidth to share data between onboard systems [1]. Most of these systems rely on high speed electrical transmission lines that are heavy, bulky, sensitive to EMI and increasingly unable to cope with the very high bandwidths required for large data handling. Traditional ground based telecommunications have already evolved from metal cables and electronic transmission to fiber optic systems, and a similar metamorphosis is now required for on-board avionic communications systems. Key components in avionic RF photonic links include high power DFB lasers [2,3], and linear high speed modulators to enable data transmission [4,5]. The design considerations and preliminary performances of these devices are reviewed in this paper.