High speed data transmission based on optic fiber for phased-array antennas

This paper mainly introduces a high speed data transmission system based on optical fiber, which is utilized to transmit signals for beamforming of phased-array antennas. The system mainly includes the data MUX and DEMUX, coder and decoder for line code, clock-data recovery, optical to electrical (O/E) and electrical to optical (E/O) converter etc. This system uses a long wavelength laser and allows for a 15 km link on single-mode fiber. The serial data rate is about 100 Mbit/s, and it is enough for phased-array antennas. Each part of the system was designed deliberately, so the system has high performance. Different transmitting distribution networks have been compared in the paper. Optics and electricity are jointly used in the data distribution network for phased-array antennas, and the distribution of the electrical network is as short as possible in the entire distribution network. The system can support different flexible interfaces based on different data rates. The final test result shows that the bit error rate is better than 10^-9 in the system. So it basically satisfies the demands of the phased-array antennas