Simulation of a Ring Resonator-Based Optical Beamformer System for Phased Array Receive Antennas

A new simulator tool is described that can be used in the field of RF photonics. It has been developed on the basis of a broadband, continuously tunable optical beamformer system for phased array receive antennas. The application that is considered in this paper is airborne satellite reception of digital television. The simulator tool has been developed in LabVIEW. The simulation model comprises a dynamical implementation of the optical beamforming network, such that beamforming can be performed for any number of antenna elements (AEs). The scalability of the model has been investigated by determining the computational complexity relations of the most critical blocks. It was found that a simulation of a full-scale beamformer can be performed within a reasonable amount of time.