Microphotonics-Based Architectures of Mini-SAR Payloads

Miniaturized synthetic aperture radar (mini-SAR) payloads are strongly demanded for enabling very innovative Earth observation small satellite missions providing images with sub-meter resolution. Unfortunately, currently available analog and digital electronic technologies still do not allow the fulfilment of the requirements imposed by those missions. Here we discuss how integrated microphotonics can be used to implement the most critical functionalities of a SAR instrument and report on some recent results obtained in the field of photonic integrated devices and circuits intended for RF beamforming and linearly chirped microwave waveform generation.