Technical Design of Microwave Optical Oscillators in Radar Systems

The emerging new concepts and technologies based on microwave photonics have led to an ever-increasing interest in developing innovative radar systems with a net gain in functionality, bandwidth/resolution, size, mass, complexity, and cost when compared with traditional implementations. This paper describes the techniques developed in the last few years in microwave photonics that might revolutionize the way to design multifunction radar systems. Here, the emphasis is on the recent advances in optoelectronic oscillators, arbitrary waveform generation, photonic mixing, phase coding, filtering, beamforming, analog-to-digital conversion, and stable radio-frequency signal transfer. Challenges in the implementation of these components and subsystems for meeting the technical requirements of the multifunction radar applications are discussed.