A Photonic Multiband Radar Transmitter Architecture with Tailored Nonlinear Transmission Line

A photonic multiband radio detection and ranging (radar) transmitter architecture is presented. In the proposed approach, a single frequency modulated continuos wave (FMCW) local oscillator (LO) signal is distributed optically to the transmitter (TX) frontend. Within the TX frontend, the optical LO signal is converted into an electrical signal, before a nonlinear transmission line generates the three harmonics of the fundamental LO signal. Within this paper, such a transmitter architecture is proposed and the optical LO distribution and the harmonic generation is presented.All components of the multiband radar TX can be integrated monolithically into a single silicon based electronic photonic integrated circuit (EPIC), which would enable low cost, large aperture phased array with or without multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) techniques.