Microwave photonic de-chirp receiver for breaking the detection range swath limitation

A novel microwave photonics-based de-chirp radar receiver which breaks the limitation of the detection range swath is proposed and demonstrated. In the proposed receiver, a multi-channel time-division photonics de-chirp processing is implemented to increase the detection range swath. A linear frequency modulated pulse train is sent to multiple reception channels and temporally delayed in the optical domain to form reference signal replicas, enabling time-division photonics-de-chirp processing with echoes reflected from different distance regions so that the total detection range swath is increased and determined by the number of reference replicas. Hardware-in-the-loop simulation experiments are demonstrated and an inverse synthetic aperture 2D imaging is carried out, showing that the MWP radar with the proposed photonics de-chirp receiver is capable of achieving a detection range swath of 13km which is 20 times larger than that when employing a conventional de-chirp receiver with the same parameters.