Channelized Photonic Stretch Receiver for LFM-CW Radar

A novel photonic technique to perform stretch processing for a wideband linearly-frequency-modulated continuous wave (LFM-CW) radar based on the conception of channelization is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The proposed system consists of a signal generation unit, an optical local oscillator (OLO) generation unit, and a group of parallel detection units. In the proposed system an optical phase correlated reference signal is introduced to the optical-frequency-comb-based channelization technique to provide a reference for data recovery. The proposed technique is experimentally evaluated through a series of static measurements of trihedral corner reflectors (TCRs) distributed along a wide range window.