Coherent Optical RF Channelizer With Large Instantaneous Bandwidth and Large In-Band Interference Suppression

RF channelization is regarded as one of the most effective approaches to relieve the difficulty of processing wideband signals in microwave and millimeter-wave receivers. In this paper, a novel coherent optical RF channelizer with broad instantaneous bandwidth and large in-band interference suppression is proposed and demonstrated based on a multichannel photonic image-reject mixer (IRM). A Ku-band RF signal with an instantaneous bandwidth of 5 GHz is sliced into five consecutive subchannels with 1-GHz instantaneous bandwidth by the proposed channelizer. The in-band interference suppression, which relies on the image-rejection ratios of the IRM, is about 25 dB. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed channelizer achieves the highest in-band interference suppression in such wide instantaneous bandwidth.