Microwave pulse phase encoding using a photonic microwave delay-line filter

A novel technique to perform microwave pulse phase encoding using an incoherent photonic microwave delay-line filter is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. Being different from a regular microwave delay-line filter, in which the time-delay differences are identical between any adjacent taps, the proposed filter has nonidentical time-delay differences. A phase-encoded microwave pulse with the required code pattern is generated by properly adjusting the time-delay differences. The chip number of a generated phase code is determined by the number of the filter taps, and the phase shift of each chip is determined by the corresponding time-delay difference. The proposed technique is verified by experiments. The generation of binary and quaternary phase-coded pulses is experimentally demonstrated.