Phased array antennas (PAAs) offer many advantages including steering without physical movement, accurate beam pointing increased scan flexibility in two dimensions, and precise PAA element phase and amplitude control. The complexity associated with controlling the many thousand array elements, while handling the broad bandwidth required of a shared antenna, makes the marriage of photonics and microwave radar very attractive.

Modern PAA systems use compressive fiber optic (FO) true time delay (TTD) system for broadband high performance Phased Array Antenna (PAA) applications. The TTD steering is based on WDM architecture to dramatically reduce system complexity, hardware, weight, volume, and cost.

Key elements in WDM optically steered PAAs are the DWDM laser sources. Depending on the complexity and the accuracy of the system, the number of WDM sources can vary from 8 to 40 or more, usually on the ITU grid. The cost, size and the power consumption of these sources are some of the major considerations when designing these systems.

Peleton’s MCLA is the perfect fit that can address all these design constraints. PAA architecture utilizing MCLA source is illustrated in Fig 4.

Fig 4.