Incoherent Photonic Processing for Chirped Microwave Pulse Generation

Abstract

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a fully reconfigurable generator of chirped microwave pulses based on the processing of an incoherent optical signal by means of a dispersive element with a non-uniform optical spectral shaping. The system performance has been proved by the generation of different chirped microwave pulses. Different capabilities of the system has been experimentally demonstrated as frequency tunability and TBWP control by means of the dispersive element and optical source power distribution. Furthermore, the possibility for generating chirped microwave pulses with positive and negative chirp characteristic has been shown achieving similar chirps in terms of magnitude but opposite sign. For it, chirp characteristic is introduced by the proper shaping of the signal power distribution of the optical source.

A Review of Photonic Generation of Arbitrary Microwave Waveforms

“…The Taylor series technique therefore does not require spectral dispersers which are generally difficult to realise on chip. There is also a significant interest in the frequency chirp generations using Fourier pulse shaping and frequency to time mapping, especially the demonstration compact photonic integration [43], flexible tuning of chirp rate [37], control of chirp sign [44] and the ability of shaping the waveform envelop [45]. There are also applications of arbitrary waveform generation for measuring and compensating for multipath channel propagation that overcomes inter-symbol interference [46] and for rapidly reconfigurable RF filtering [38,47].…”