A Promising Outlook for Imaging Radar: Imaging Flash Radar Realized Using Photonic Spatial Beam Processing

Since their conception in the early 1900s, radar systems have mostly used a single RF beam to probe the environment in search of objects of interest. Traditionally, this is accomplished by scanning the beam over a defined region and using time of flight to determine the range of objects located within the beam. As such, a key figure of merit is the spatial extent, or angular divergence, of the RF beam because it defines the lateral (or cross-range) resolution of detectable objects, while the operational bandwidth (BW) of the radar determines the range resolution of detectable objects. In combination, these two metrics often define the overall capability of the radar system.