An integrated Ku-band nanosecond time-stretching system using improved dispersive delay line (DDL)

In this paper, we report an on-chip implementation of a Ku-band nanosecond scale time-stretching (TS) system in a 130 nm CMOS process. The system employs a linear chirp generator realized by ramping the control voltage of the voltage controlled oscillator (VCO), a broadband amplitude modulation (AM) circuit and an active dispersive delay line (DDL) improved from a previous integrated DDL, showing 1 ns dispersion over the frequency range from 12 GHz to 16 GHz. This work not only shows the experimental demonstration of the time stretching effect on the pulsed signal, but also indicates the potential for implementation of more complicated time scaling signal processing systems on chip.