Design of an Integrated-Photonics RF Beamformer for Multi-Beam Satellite Synthetic Aperture Radar

This paper presents the design and the performance analysis of a photonics-based beamformer for a spaceborne synthetic aperture radar implementing the scan-on-receive functionality. The considered device is a hybrid photonic integrated circuit composed of actives in InP and passives in TriPleX™, realizing the fast beamforming of three receiver beams out of 12 radio-frequency input signals and providing their simultaneous down-conversion to intermediate frequency. The analysis considers as main performance indicators the gain, the noise figure, and the dynamic range of the photonics-based beamformer, and demonstrates the device compliance to the application requirements and its suitability for satellite missions.