Frequency Downconverting Fiber Grating-Based Beamformers for High-Capacity Phased Arrays

A technique is presented to remove the beat noise limitation in multibeam beam formers using a simple all-optical microwave frequency downconversion technique prior to performing the true-time delay equalization in the optical domain. The frequency conversion concept enables a significant increase in beam-number capac ity to be achieved due to the elimination of beat noise limits, and also effectively removes the power penalty due to chromatic dispersion limitations of the chirped grating units in the beamformer. The Bragg grating requirements for the frequency converting beamforming network are analyzed and show that tanh-profile apodized gratings can meet the isolation, reflectivity, and narrow bandwidth requirements. For an X-band phased array, more than a twofold increase in beam capacity is shown through the use of the frequency conversion technique with the grating-based beamformer, and the resulting beamformer has the minimum number of optical interconnects with true-time delay operation.