Special Symposium on Photonic Generation of Microwave & Millimeter-Wave Arbitrary Waveforms

Photonic pulse shaping for the generation of microwave and millimeter-wave arbitrary waveforms has been a topic of interest and has found many important applications such as in modern communications, radar and imaging systems. Conventionally, an arbitrary waveform is generated in the electrical domain based on digital electronics. However, the major limitation associated with the electrical approach is that the generated arbitrary waveform has a low central frequency and bandwidth due to the limited speed of the current digital electronics. At the current stage of development of modern communications, radar and imaging systems, a central frequency from tens to hundreds of GHz is often required. An efficient solution to the problem is to generate high-frequency arbitrary waveforms in the optical domain. In this special symposium, recent developments in photonic microwave and millimeter-wave abitrary waveform generation and the applications in communications and radar systems will be discussed.