An autoencoder-residual (AE-Res) network is designated to assist the linearization of the wideband photonic scanning channelized receiver. It is capable of adaptively suppressing spurious distortions over multiple octaves of signal bandwidth, obviating the need for calculating the multifactorial nonlinear transfer functions. Proof-of-concept experiments indicate that the improvement of the third-order spur-free dynamic range (SFDR2/3) is 17.44 dB. Moreover, the results for real wireless communication signals demonstrate that the improvement of the spurious suppression ratio (SSR) is 39.69 dB and the reduction of the noise floor is ∼10 dB.

A novel photonic-assisted time-interleaved sampling analog-to-digital converter (ADC) utilizing photonic radio frequency memory (PRFM) is proposed. The analog modulated optical signal can be duplicated by PRFM and digitized by a slower electronic ADC, thus increasing of equivalent sampling rate to hundreds of times. A microwave photonic link simulation model investigating the performance of sampling an RF signal with a 55ns duration and 500MHz bandwidth was conducted with 4.9 effective number of bits (ENOB). The equivalent sampling rate reached more than 3.6 GSample/s, an increase of over 360 times of the original 10 MSample/s rate.

Due to the nonlinear and aliasing effects, the sub-Nyquist photonic receiver for radio frequency (RF) signals with large instantaneous bandwidth suffers limited dynamic range and noise performance. We designated a deep residual network (Resnet) to realize adaptive linearization across 40 GHz bandwidth. In contrast to conventional linearization methods, the deep learning method achieves the suppression of multifactorial spurious distortions and the noise floor simultaneously. It does not require an accurate calculation of the nonlinear transfer function or prior signal information. The experiments demonstrated that the proposed Resnet could improve the spur-free dynamic range (SFDR) and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) significantly by testing with single-tone signals, dual-tone signals, wireless communication signals, and modulated radar signals.