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 $\mu \text{s}$ 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 $\cdot $ , 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.