Photonic-assisted chirped microwave pulses generation with a flexible and fine parameter manipulation

A photonic approach for generating chirped microwave pulses with a flexible and fine parameter manipulation is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. In the proposed system, an intensity modulator (IM) biased at the minimum transmission point is used to generate two ± 1st-order optical sidebands which are then sent to a phase modulator (PM) for implementing large-signal phase modulations. A de-interleaver combined with an optical variable delay line (OVDL) is utilized to introduce a time delay between two phase-modulated optical signals. A second IM that acts as a time domain intensity switch (TDIS) is used to select different phase modulation ranges of the two phase-modulated optical signals. After the optical-electrical conversion in a photodetector (PD), chirped microwave pulses are generated. The key feature of this approach is that the parameters of the generated chirped microwave pulses including central frequency, pulse repetition frequency, and chirp rate can be flexibly and precisely manipulated by the radio frequency (RF) signals applied to modulators. A proof-of-principle experiment is carried out to verify the proposed approach. Consequently, positive or negative chirped microwave pulses with different central frequencies at 20, 22, 24 or 26 GHz and different pulse repetition frequencies at 1.5 or 2 GHz are generated, respectively.