Download or read book Optical Beamforming Networks for Radars & Electronic Warfare Applications written by Jean Chazelas and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 14 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Future microwave systems will be generally based on active electronic antennas. This evolution is determined by requirements of improved performances of these equipments in terms of reliability, jamming resistance, flexibility for the beamformning in the transmit and in the receive mode. Such antennas will be use in a large number of applications such as radar, communication and electronic warfare. In order to satisfy this multiftuictional aspects, it will be necessary to distribute these antennas on ground based areas as well as the aircraft surface. Multistatic systems will impose multiple remoting of antennas with respect to their processing units. In all cases, it appears a need for low loss link able to remote the control of the antennas as well as distribution and processing of very wideband microwave signals (typ. 1-20 GHz). Maturity and performances (in terms of spectral purity or phase noise, dynamic range linearity) of optoelectronic components permit to envisage the optical transmission and the optical processing of these signals. Today, the optical transmission of microwave signals offers in conjunction with their low loss propagation over very wide frequency bandwidth, a high immunity to electromagnetic perturbations, which opens new avenues for the insertion of new concepts and photonic architectures in microwave systems. Photonics and microwave technologies offers new opportunities for controlling many thousand - array elements together with handling the wide bandwidth of shared aperture antennas. Photonics technologies will provide an interconnect solution for future airborne phased array radar antennas, which have conformality, bandwidth, EMI immunity, size, and weight requirements increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to meet using oonventionnal electrical interconnect methods.