Patent ID: 11888561
Assignee: MELLANOX TECHNOLOGIES, LTD.
Field: Telecommunications (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC H | IPC H

Claim 14:
15. A beamforming system comprising:
an array of N antennas, where N is a positive integer;
at least one multi-wavelength optical source configured to provide at least one first beam of a first wavelength and at least one second beam of a second wavelength; and
N beamforming elements, each beamforming element of the N beamforming elements associated with a respective one of the N antennas, each beamforming element comprising:
an imprinting-shifting component configured to imprint a respective input signal onto the at least one second beam to form an imprinted beam, wherein the imprinting-shifting component comprises
at least one modulator, and
a splitting optical filtering element configured to receive the imprinted beam and provide a plurality of output beams, each output beam of the plurality of output beams corresponding to a respective channel frequency range, and
a plurality of phase shifters to adjust respective optical phases of the plurality of output beams independently to obtain respective phase-shifted imprinted beams;

one or more multi-beam optical couplers each configured to receive a respective phase-shifted imprinted beam and the at least one first beam, and further configured to cause the phase-shifted imprinted beam and the at least one first beam to interfere with one another to form a respective interference beam; and
one or more optical-to-electrical converter components each configured to receive a respective interference beam and generate a respective frequency-shifted electrical signal based on the respective interference beam and having a time delay corresponding to the adjustment of the optical phase of the imprinted beam.