Photonics For Microwave Processing In Radar Systems

Abstract

Future active radar systems, based on solid state T/R modules will provide new capabilities, especially in terms of reliability, jamming robustness and complete flexibility. For the future, airborne antennas are planned to be distributed over the entire aircraft while ground based antennnas will be remoted from the processing unit. In both cases there is a need of low loss transmission links allowing 'the remote control of the antennas and the distribution of large bandwidth microwave signals. Moreover future multifunction phased array antennas will require frequency bandwidth which largely exceed those of existing radars. Such wide instantaneous bandwidths (up to 30 % of the center frequency) lead to the definition of advanced concepts and technologies. Owing to their inherent parallel processing capabilities, optoelectronic architectures are well suited for the implementation, in radar and electronic warfare (EW) systems, of basic functions such as time-delay beamforming, spectrum analysis, adaptive filtering and correlation.1