Known as an analogue photonic correlator, the device is considerably simpler than equivalent devices existing today, the researchers said.
“The photonic architecture we developed uses no moving parts and enables real-time signal processing,” said researcher Hugues Guillet de Chatellus. “Real-time processing helps ensure there isn’t any downtime, which is critical for defence applications, for example.”
Many of today’s radio signals have large bandwidths in order to increase the amount of data they can carry. The device offers a simple method for correlating signals with bandwidths of up to a few GHz, a larger bandwidth than is available from commercial approaches based on purely digital techniques.
It can be used to compute what is known as a cross-correlation function for two signals emitted from one source and detected by two antennas. This measures the similarity of the signals as a function of the displacement of one signal relative to the other and...