Research on technology of microwave-photonic-based multifunctional radar

Prospective characteristics of the next generation of radar is investigated in this paper, combined with future requirement. The demands of the next generation radar for the wide band, high speed, parallelism and high integration are precisely the four prominent respects of photonics. The technological path of future radar could hopefully be interdisciplinary fusion to solve bottleneck problems in the microwave field by means of optical methods, ideas and technical features, namely constructing microwave photonics technology based radar system. One system architecture of multifunctional radar based on the technology of microwave photonics is proposed. Meanwhile, representative techniques such as photonic frequency conversion and photonic beamforming are presented. Some stages of experiment and test results are reported.