Time-frequency analysis of microwave signals based on stimulated Brillouin scattering

TL;DR

This paper introduces a photonic method using stimulated Brillouin scattering for real-time and high-resolution time-frequency analysis of microwave signals, verified through simulations and experiments.

Contribution

It proposes two novel SBS-based links for microwave signal analysis, enabling real-time and ultra-high-resolution capabilities with reconfigurable structures.

Findings

Real-time analysis with 3.9 GHz bandwidth

Frequency resolution of 15 MHz demonstrated

Analysis frequency up to 20 GHz achieved

Abstract

A novel photonic approach to the time-frequency analysis of microwave signals is proposed based on the stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS)-assisted frequency-to-time mapping (FTTM). Two types of time-frequency analysis links, namely parallel SBS link and time-division SBS link are proposed. The parallel SBS link can be utilized to perform real-time time-frequency analysis of microwave signal, which provides a promising solution for real-time time-frequency analysis, especially when it is combined with the photonic integration technique. A simulation is made to verify its feasibility by analyzing signals in multiple formats. The time-division SBS link has a simpler and reconfigurable structure, which can realize an ultra-high-resolution time-frequency analysis for periodic signals using the time segmentation and accumulation technique. An experiment is performed for the time-division SBS link. The multi-dimensional reconfigurability of the system is experimentally studied. An analysis bandwidth of 3.9 GHz, an analysis frequency up to 20 GHz, and a frequency resolution of 15 MHz are demonstrated, respectively.