Photonics for Ultrawideband RF Spectral Analysis in Electronic Warfare Applications

Electronic warfare receivers must satisfy particularly demanding requirements, and current electronic solutions must find a tradeoff between the request for high performance (in particular, very wide bandwidth, very high sensitivity, and very linear response) and the need for light and small systems. Photonics has been often proposed as a potential enabler of performance improvements, thanks to its wide tunability and precision, and recently the advancements of the photonic integration technologies are also promising strong reductions of size and weight. In this paper, we present an overview of the photonics-based solutions proposed so far in the field of electronic warfare. In particular, we focus on the specific implementation of a spectrum scanner we have recently proposed. Besides the performance in terms of bandwidth, linearity, and sensitivity, which are on par with the state-of-the-art electronic commercial systems, here, we report on our last advancements in terms of tuning speed. Further improvements are also discussed, in terms of both tuning speed and integrability.