A Microwave Photonic Signal Processor for Arbitrary Microwave Waveform Generation and Pulse Compression

A microwave photonic signal processor for arbitrary microwave waveform generation and pulse compression based on a microwave photonic filter (MPF) and a time reversal module (TRM) is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. In the proposed signal processor, an arbitrary microwave waveform is generated by allowing an ultrashort microwave pulse to pass through an MPF and a TRM, to get a microwave waveform to have a spectrum that is the complex conjugate of the spectral response of the MPF. When the generated microwave waveform is transmitted and received, by passing the received microwave waveform through the same MPF, matched filtering is performed and the microwave waveform is compressed. The proposed microwave photonic signal processor is verified by two experiments, in which a linearly chirped microwave waveform (LCMW) with a bandwidth of 7.7 GHz and a 7-bit phase-coded microwave waveform (PCMW) with a carrier frequency of 4.08 GHz are generated and compressed. The temporal durations of the generated LCMW and PCMW are 5.57 and 5.4 ns, respectively, and the widths of the compressed pulses are 0.27 and 0.58 ns, corresponding to pulse compression ratios of 20.6 and 9.3, respectively.