Optical Delay Line Correlator

In order to fully realize the processing gain of many modern radar systems employing coherent processing of phase coded transmissions, the received waveform and the reference waveform processed in the receiver correlator must be identical. Unfortunately, phase distortions in the transmitted waveform introduced in both the IF upconversion stages and final TWT amplifier stage often seriously degrade the level of processing gain achievable in the correlator. We propose to design a fully architected optical delay line correlator, which will store the transmitted bwaveform and processes the cross correlation between the delayed reference and received waveforms fat high throughput rates. Our baseline approach utilizes a high fidelity analog optical delay network demploying erbium doped amplifiers for gain compensation, and a well established time-integrating AO Vbased correlator to achieve high throughput with moderate to high bandwidth waveforms. We shall use existing optical device performance parameters, together with analysis of the correlation process, to establish the operational limits for the useful range window, slant range resolution, correlation gain, and dynamic range provided by the wideband optical delay line correlation processor.