High-Precision Photonics-Assisted Two-Step Microwave Frequency Measurement Combining Time and Power Mapping Method

Photonics-assisted methods for microwave frequency measurement (MFM) show great potential for overcoming electronic bottlenecks and offer promising applications in radar and communication due to their wide bandwidth and immunity to electromagnetic interference. In common photonics-assisted MFM methods, the frequency-to-time mapping (FTTM) method has the capability to measure various types of signals, but with a trade-off between measurement error, measurement range, and real-time performance, while the frequency-to-power mapping (FTPM) method offers low measurement error but faces great difficulty in measuring signal types other than single-tone signals. In this paper, a two-step high-precision MFM method based on the combination of FTTM and FTPM is proposed, which balances real-time performance with measurement precision and resolution compared with other similar works based on the FTTM method. By utilizing high-speed optical sweeping and an optical filter based on stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS), FTTM is accomplished, enabling the rough identification of multiple different signals. Next, based on the results from the previous step, more precise measurement results can be calculated from several additional sampling points according to the FTPM principle. The demonstration system can perform optical sweeping at a speed of 20 GHz/μs in the measurement range of 1–18 GHz, with a measurement error of less than 10 MHz and a frequency resolution of 40 MHz.