Computer-Aided Design of Microwave-Photonics-Based RF Circuits and Systems

In the process of design, a developer of new microwave-photonics-based RF apparatuses is facing a problem of choosing appropriate software. As of today, the existing optical and optoelectronic CAD tools (OE-CAD) are not developed like CAD tools intended for modeling of RF circuits (E-CAD). On the contrary, operating at symbolic level, modern high-power microwave E-CAD tools simply and with high precision solve this problem, but there are no models of active photonic components in their libraries. To overcome this problem, we proposed and validated experimentally a new approach to model a broad class of promising analog microwave radio-electronics systems based on microwave photonics technology. This chapter reviews our known, updated, new models and simulation results using microwave-electronics off-the-shelf computer tool NI AWRDE to pursue advanced performances corresponding to the last generation of key photonics structural elements and important RF devices on their basis.