Agile High-Q RF Photonic Zooming Filter

We report on the development of an agile radio frequency (RF) photonic receiver front-end based on a tunable single pole band-pass RF photonic filter with reconfigurable pass band. The filter center frequency is tunable from 30 MHz to 3 GHz (VHF-UHF frequency band) in a microsecond time interval, and its bandwidth is adjustable from 100 kHz to 100 MHz in less than 10 μs time interval. The filter out-of-band rejection ratio exceeds 35 dB. The filter features 23 dB frequency independent insertion loss and -140 dBm/Hz noise floor with respect to input, as well as 110 dB.Hz
^2/3
spurious free dynamic range measured at 100 MHz filter bandwidth. The use of photonics technology allows adjusting the center frequency of the filter to any frequency within 30 MHz-100 GHz range without performance degradation.