An Electronic Attack-Protection Integrated Front-End Enabled by Reconfigurable Photonic RF Memory

Abstract

The integration of wideband electronic attack (EA) and electronic protection (EP) is a growing concern in electronic countermeasures (ECMs) as wireless technology advances. However, electronic hardware in conventional ECMs already approaches its bandwidth ceiling, making the solutions for high-performance, scalable, and reconfigurable optical signal processing extremely imperative, such as photonic RF memory (PRFM). This work demonstrates a phase–amplitude evolution mechanism in PRFM, where phase evolution enables radar range deception and amplitude evolution serves to scramble and diffuse the optical quantum noise for enhanced communication security. Founded on this, a novel microwave photonic front-end using orthogonal polarizations was developed and experimentally executed. In EA tasks, a 12-GHz optical frequency comb (OFC) signal was cyclically stored for$1000~\mu $s with high fidelity, creating 400 range false targets. Thanks to the Doppler frequency replication based on coherent OFC technology, the number of range–velocity compound 2-D false targets increased to 4400 ($400\times 11$). In EP tasks, a 4-Gbaud QPSK signal was initially encrypted into a$2^{16}$-QAM/quantum noise stream cipher (QNSC) signal and underwent 200 security adjustments in the loop at an 8% error vector magnitude (EVM) penalty, resulting in a nearly fourfold privacy improvement. Tuning of the number of circulations can compatibly reconstruct the jamming and security levels. Furthermore, an SNR monitoring probe was involved in the case of radar intrusion into communications, prompting communication tasks to adaptively respond to the threats. Therefore, our scheme pioneers the first integration of signal storage, 2-D radar jamming, private communication, security reconfiguration, and adaptive risk response in a wideband microwave photonic front-end, strongly addressing the reinforcement need of future ECMs.