DOI: 10.1109/TMTT.2025.3581547   IEEEXplore: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11059386

A photonically actuated ultrawideband (UWB), 2×8 2-D transmit array using a Fourier optical lens as a beamformer

10 – 20 GHz in this demonstration; up to 50 GHz is possible

The 2×8 2-D RF front-end consists of a tapered slot antenna (TSA), medium power amplifiers (MPA), and needle-packaged photodetector (PD) arrays. The transmitted beam direction is selected using a beam-space optical fiber array fed through an optical switch matrix, where RF beamforming is realized with a Fourier optical lens that consumes no power. Such photonic processing offers several key advantages, including an interchangeable and flexible RF front-end, remote operation capability, scalability to larger phased arrays, and simultaneous multiple transmit beams if a P×Q nonblocking optical switch is used. The data encoding scheme features a custom intermediate frequency (IF) signal/data modulated on phase-locked tunable optical paired sources (TOPSs).

Radar, ultrafast communication, RF sensing, SATCOM, 5G communication and many other MIMO applications.

2×8 beams can be formed with a spatial isolation of >25 dB; up to 25 dBm transmit power per element over the frequency range