Optical Beamformer Based on Diffraction Order Multiplexing (DOM) of an Arrayed Waveguide Grating

Microwave Photonic Radars

“…Up to now, many achievements have been reported on the photonic integrated circuits for possible radar applications [400]. In particular, a variety of integrated optical beamformers have been demonstrated based on optical ring resonators [71], Mach-Zehnder delay interferometer [401], and arrayed waveguide grating [402]; integrated OEOs were also reported although the phase noise performance still needs improvement [403]. In addition, some multifunctional building blocks such as reflective-type microring resonator [404] and programmable 2D mesh network [405] have been demonstrated, which might be useful for reconfigurable or software-defined microwave photonic radar.…”

Microwave Photonic Array Radars

“…Generally, optical switches with a fast switching speed and a high extinction ratio are required. The optical path switching based time delay can also be implemented using tunable lasers together with wavelengthdependent true time delay devices [53], [54]. Fig.…”

Multi-beam optical beamformer based on the integrated arrayed waveguide grating

“…Furthermore, it is difficult to get uniform delay responses within the operating bandwidth. In order to overcome such problems, solutions based on integrated devices have been proposed, such as cascaded arrayed waveguide grating (AWG), ring resonators, and waveguide delay line [5][6][7][8][9][10]. Nevertheless, the efforts cited above have been limited to the single-beam beamforming case, aiming to confirm the fundamental operating principles.…”

“…Such structure could significantly reduce the number of devices in multi-beamforming network, since it only requires M AWG modules for M beamformers. The difference is that the technique in [5] is used for transmitter, while the proposed one here is used for receiver. Experimental results show that five optical beamformers for an eight-element array antenna have been achieved simultaneously with the insertion loss of only 5.64 dB, which covers the airspace from -36° to 18°.…”