Microwave waveform generation with reconfigurable envelope and high fidelity based on spectrum compensated frequency-to-time mapping

A photonic approach for generating radio frequency (RF) chirped and non-chirped waveforms with reconfigurable envelope and high fidelity is proposed and experimentally demonstrated based on frequency-to-time mapping (FTM). A space light modulator based pulse shaper is used for spectral shaping. To make full use of the available bandwidth of the pulse shaper, the output of an amplified mode-locked laser is used as a broadband optical source. A feedback scheme is proposed to compensate the absence of the amplified spontaneous emission spectrum in frequency-to-time mapping. Based on the spectrum compensated FTM, chirped and non-chirped waveforms with different envelopes and high fidelity are experimentally generated.