Adaptive non-uniform photonic time stretch for blind RF signal detection with compressed time-bandwidth product

Photonic time stretch significantly extends the effective bandwidth of existing analog-to-digital convertors by slowing down the input high-speed RF signals. Non-uniform photonic time stretch further enables time bandwidth product reduction in RF signal detection by selectively stretching high-frequency features more. However, it requires the prior knowledge of spectral-temporal distribution of the input RF signal and has to reconfigure the time stretch filter for different RF input signals. Here we propose for the first time an adaptive non-uniform photonic time stretch method based on microwave photonics pre-stretching that achieves blind detection of high-speed RF signals with reduced time bandwidth product. Non-uniform photonic time stretch using both quadratic and cubic group delay response has been demonstrated and time bandwidth product compression ratios of 72% and 56% have been achieved respectively.