Wideband multi-beam photonics-based RF beamformer

摘要

This paper presents a photonics based multi-beam RF beamformer for phased array antenna systems. This RF beamformer uses fiber optic WDM-Mux/DeMux and photonic true time delay techniques, independently and simultaneously enabling multi-beam operation in wide RF frequency range. A four-antennas of RF beamforming breadboard is built to operate two-beam for verifying its functionalities. The simultaneously steering of two beams over +/− 50° and 4GHz bandwidth have been demonstrated experimentally.