Highly Scalable Adaptive Photonic Beamformer Using a Single Mode to Multimode Optical Combiner

Abstract

This letter presents a novel architecture for a wideband photonic beamformer. The system is best suited for an adaptive beamforming application related to a highly non-stationary environment, requiring rapid beam steering. Using optical transversal filters for each antenna element, the array is capable of both spatial beamforming and frequency-domain filtering. With the use of a single-mode fiber to multimode fiber coupling technique, our system is highly scalable, and the same set of laser wavelengths can be used for every antenna in the system. Experimental results are presented to show proof-of-concept and demonstrates proposed adaptive beamformer performance.