Abstract

We present a novel photonic beamformer for a fully integrated transmit phased array antenna, together with an automatic procedure for tuning the delays in this system. Such an automatic tuning procedure is required because the large number of actuators makes manual tuning practically impossible. The antenna system is designed for the purpose of the broadband aircraft-satellite communication in the $\mathrm{K_u}$ -band to provide satellite Internet connections on board the aircraft. The goal of the beamformer is to automatically steer the transmit antenna electronically in the direction of the satellite. This is done using a mix of phase shifters and tunable optical delay lines, which are all integrated on a chip and laid out in a tree structure. The $\mathrm{K_u}$ -band has a bandwidth of 0.5 GHz. We show how an optical delay line is automatically configured over this bandwidth, providing a delay of approximately 0.4 ns. The tuning algorithm calculates the best actuator voltages based on past measurements. This is the first time that such an automatic tuning scheme is used on a photonic beamformer for this type of transmit phased array antenna. We show that the proposed method is able to provide accurate beamforming ( ${<}\text{11.25}^{\circ}$ phase error over the whole bandwidth) for two different delay settings.

Graphene-based fine-tunable optical delay line for optical beamforming in phased-array antennas

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System integration and radiation pattern measurements of a phased array antenna employing an integrated photonic beamformer for radio astronomy applications

Maurizio Burla, Chris G. H. Roeloffzen, Leimeng Zhuang, David Marpaung, Muhammad Rezaul Khan, Peter Maat, Klaas Dijkstra, Arne Leinse, Marcel Hoekman, and René Heideman
Appl. Opt. 51(7) 789-802 (2012)

Dimensioning of a multibeam coherent photonic beamformer fed by a phased array antenna

Miguel V. Drummond, Vanessa C. Duarte, André Albuquerque, Rogério N. Nogueira, Leontios Stampoulidis, Georg Winzer, Lars Zimmermann, Stephen Clements, and Javad Anzalchi
Opt. Express 26(5) 6158-6171 (2018)

Photonic dual RF beam reception of an X band phased array antenna using a photonic crystal fiber-based true-time-delay beamformer

Harish Subbaraman, Maggie Yihong Chen, and Ray T. Chen
Appl. Opt. 47(34) 6448-6452 (2008)