Broadband photonic ADC for microwave photonics-based radar receiver

A broadband photonic analog-to-digital converter (ADC) for X-band radar applications is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. An X-band signal with arbitrary waveform and a bandwidth up to 2 GHz can be synchronously sampled and processed due to the optical sampling structure. In the experiment, the chirp signal centered at 9 GHz with a bandwidth of 1.6 GHz is sampled and down-converted with a signal-to-noise ratio of 7.20 dB and an improved noise figure. Adopting the photonic ADC in the radar receiver and the above signal as the transmitted radar signal, an X-band inverse synthetic aperture radar system is set up, and the range and cross-range resolutions of 9.4 and 8.3 cm are obtained, respectively.