A microwave photonic receiver for high performance radars

A resonant photonic receiver is designed to efficiently upconvert a weak microwave signal, such as a return signal of a millimeter-wave radar, to optical frequency domain and then transfer this signal to an intermediate microwave frequency, convenient for further processing. Such a process is far less demanding in terms of the instrument size, weight and power than the direct high frequency microwave detection and down conversion. The resonant photonic receiver facilitates an amplification of the signal power with low noise temperature which improved the instrument sensitivity relative to the stateof-the-art. A combination of these factors will enable a new generation of ultra-compact radars suitable for Smallsat and Cubesat applications. We report the theoretical analysis and numeric simulations justifying the photonic approach to millimeter-wave detection based on high-quality nonlinear optical resonators, as well as the preliminary tests results.