A Microwave Photonic Tunable Receiver with Digital Feed-Forward Phase Noise Cancellation for Electronic Support Measures and Antenna Remoting

A high performance photonics-based RF tunable receiver that exploits a novel digital feed-forward phase noise cancellation technique is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. In the scheme, a signal receiver exploits an optical I/Q architecture fed by two free-running lasers to filter and down-convert to baseband the incoming RF signal. At the same time, a reference receiver acquires the phase-noise of the two free-running lasers by heterodyning them with an optical frequency comb. Then, a digital feed-forward algorithm utilizes the heterodyning signal to extract the differential phase noise between the two free-running lasers so that to cancel the phase noise that the lasers sources introduce to the baseband signal. Moreover, the scheme is effectively divided in a central unit and a remote-antenna module in order to provide improved remoting capability through fiber optic links. An experiment demonstrates low phase noise operation in an RF input range of 0-50 GHz, only limited by the available laboratory equipment. Photonic integration of the scheme will reach high environmental stability and chip-scale footprint, targeting the challenging requirements of next-generation electronic support measures systems.