Integrated microwave photonics: Overview and promising space applications

Photonic integrated circuits technology now enables the integration of several hundreds of optoelectronic and photonic active and passive devices on a single chip. This technology is having a disruptive impact on the field of microwave photonics with the demonstration of chip-scale complex sub-systems for generating and processing RF signals. Such integrated microwave photonic circuits exhibit features very attractive in the field of space engineering such as small size, weight, and power consumption. In this paper, the space applications of integrated microwave photonics are discussed with a special emphasis on RF pass-band filters for reconfigurable telecom payloads and delay lines for wideband beamforming.