High-Performance Integrated Microwave Photonic Transceiver for Dual-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar

A dual-band reconfigurable microwave photonic transceiver chip for synthetic aperture radar is proposed and demonstrated on silicon photonic platform. Study deep into material level is conducted to establish the relation between nonlinear mechanisms in silicon and the performance of the system-on-chip. Guided by the theoretical model, rational paralleled photonic circuit architecture and a series of control strategies, including waveform predistortion, linearity optimization and thermal crosstalk compensation, are put forward to realize a practical and high-performance photonic radar transceiver. RF characterizations indicate that the chip is capable to generate broadband C-band or Ku-band radar signal with low phase deviation on the order of 10<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-7</sup>. It can also conduct stretch processing in both bands with high spurious free dynamic range exceeding 100 dB·Hz<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2/3</sup>. A radar system taking the photonic chip as core is established to serve the function of two-dimensional imaging. Resolutions at centimeter level and high peak to side lobe ratios are achieved and in consistent with theoretical values. To the best of our knowledge, this work realizes superior analog frequency-conversion signal processing and imaging quality in comparison with previous works.