Optical true time delay unit with wide range and high resolution for phased array beamforming

An optical true time delay (OTTD) unit based on uniform fiber Bragg gratings, photonic crystal fiber and wavelength converter array is proposed for the phased array antennas (PAAs) beamforming system. The PAAs system based on the proposed OTTD unit can provide the scanning range from − 69.7° to + 69.7° and resolution of 1° with greatly reduced number and length of the time delay lines. The PAAs beamforming system equipped with this OTTD unit is compact, and has low bandwidth requirement on the tunable laser source. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system.

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