Continuous True-Time-Delay System Employing a Novel Tunable Chirped Fiber Grating Delay Line and a Sampled Grating Based Multiwavelength Fiber Laser

A photonics true-time-delay system for phased array antenna beam steering employing a novel tunable chirped fiber grating delay line and a multi-wavelength erbium-doped fiber ring laser source based on a sampled grating filter is proposed. The tunable chirped fiber grating, which act as a continuous time-delay element, is achieved by bending a uniform fiber Bragg grating bonded at a slant onto the lateral surface of a simply supported beam. This technique allows the dynamic control of the chirp rate and spectral width of the grating without center wavelength shift. By adjusting the chirp rate of the fiber grating via bend strain, this kind of tunable chirped fiber grating could achieve very low and adjustable delay times, therefore provides higher angle resolution for scanning microwave beam, even the wavelengths of laser source are fixed and un-tunable. The true-time-delay system using proposed tunable chirped fiber grating delay element and sampled grating based laser source is constructed and demonstrated experimentally.