Patent ID: 11515946

Abstract:
A system and method for analog estimation of a spectral correlation function (SCF) provides a photonic carrier to generate a signal comb and offset comb, each comprising N comb tones separated by respective repetition rates ΔF and ΔF+δF. The signal and offset combs are amplitude-modulated according to an inbound RF signal of interest and filtered via periodic optical filters to produce a sequence of N Fourier components of the signal comb and N Fourier components of the offset comb, each filtered signal comb component overlapping with a filtered offset comb component. In-phase/quadrature (I/Q) components of the products of each component of the complex conjugate of the filtered offset comb and the overlapping counterpart of the filtered signal comb are generated in an optical receiver and digitized into slices of the SCF at a fixed time instance and center frequency, correlated at various cyclic separations α.