Microwave spectral analysis based on photonic compressive sampling with random demodulation

In this Letter, we present a photonic compressive sampling scheme based on optical sampling and random demodulation for microwave spectral analysis. A novel (to our knowledge) approach to realizing the multiplication of a pseudorandom binary sequence and the input microwave signal of interest in the optical domain is proposed, which largely simplifies the implementation of the compressive sampling. A spectrally sparse signal can be successfully captured by an electrical digitizer with a sampling rate much lower than the Nyquist rate with the help of random demodulation and the sparse reconstruction algorithm. Identification of the signals with multiple frequency components is successfully demonstrated. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America