Flexible Multi-band Dual-chirped Microwave Waveforms Generation with Double Bandwidth

ABSTRACT A multi-band dual-chirp linearly frequency modulated (LFM) signal-generation scheme with doubled chirp bandwidth and flexible center frequency and band numbers is proposed. In the scheme, the polarization multiplexed multi-tone optical signals with chirped phases are generated via a dual-polarization dual-parallel Mach–Zehnder modulator (DPMZM) cascaded with a polarization modulator. The two polarization multiplexed lightwaves are recombined as two linearly polarized beams by a polarization beam splitter and are detected by a balanced photodiode with a photocurrent that includes the multi-band dual-chirp LFM signal with doubled bandwidth and multiplied central frequencies but does not have a dc component. Since the orders and numbers of the generated optical sidebands are changed by adjusting the bias voltages of a DPMZM, we can obtain the multi-band dual-chirp LFM signal flexibly. Based on simulation, four-band, six-band and two seven-band dual-chirp LFM signals are generated with four groups of bias voltage configurations. For each case, every dual-chirp LFM signal of the generated multi-band dual-chirp LFM signal has a 5-GHz bandwidth and a time-bandwidth product of 512. The auto-correlations and ambiguity function of the generated LFM signal show good performance of pulse compression and range-Doppler resolution.