Analysis and Simulation of a Photonic Multiband FMCW Radar Sensor System Using Nyquist Pulses

A photonic multiband radio detection and ranging (radar) sensor system is presented. In the proposed approach a single frequency modulated continous wave (FMCW) local oscillator (LO) drives a Mach Zehnder modulator (MZM), which is biased in the Nyquist point. Due to the nonlinear behavior of the MZM, harmonics of the FMCW LO signal are generated and distributed to the transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) frontends. Within this paper such a photonic multiband radar system is proposed and analysed analytically. The results of the analysis are validated by means of the proposed hardware model. It should be noted that all components of the photonic multiband radar sensor system can be integrated monolithically into a single silicon based electronic photonic integrated circuit (EPIC), which will enable low cost, large aperture phased-arrays with or without multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) techniques.