Photonic temporal integration of broadband intensity waveforms over long operation time windows

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel design for temporal integration of microwave and optical intensity waveforms with combined high processing speed and a long operation time window. It is based on concatenating in series a discrete-time (low-speed) photonic integrator and a high-speed analog time-limited intensity integrator. This scheme is demonstrated here using a cascaded fiber-based interferometers' system (as a passive eight-point discrete-time integrator) and an analog time-limited intensity integrator. The latter is based on temporal intensity modulation of the input waveform with a rectangular-like incoherent energy spectrum followed by linear dispersion. Using this setup, we experimentally achieve accurate time integration of intensity signals with ~36 GHz bandwidths over an operation time window of ~4 ns, corresponding to a processing time-bandwidth product of >144.