OPTICAL FEED NETWORK USING A FREE-SPACE OPTICAL MODULATOR FOR RF PHASED ANTENNA ARRAYS

摘要

An optical feed network (OFN) for an RF phased antenna array includes a single free-space optical beamformer that supports all of the RF electrical feed signals for the RF phased antenna array to steer an RF beam. The free-space optical beamformer can more easily scale to accommodate larger array sizes than either the discrete fiber channel or PIC implementations. Furthermore, certain embodiments of the optical beamformer avoid the complexity of having to compute FFTs for each channel to steer the beam, instead relying on the inherent function of an imaging lens to perform the FFT, which in turn facilitates rapid steering.