Microwave Photonics: in Pisa from Tuesday 17 to Friday 20 September the conference ‘International Topical Meeting on Microwave Photonics 2024’, organised by the National Interuniversity Consortium for Telecommunications, with Sant'Anna School
Applied microwave photonics is an interdisciplinary field of study that aims to combine the best of both microwave and photonics worlds. Two of the main microwave systems involved are 5G communications and radar sensing. Thanks to photonics, new devices and functions have been developed for microwave systems, such as tunable delay lines, low phase-noise electro-optical oscillators, and tunable and fast frequency converters that have enabled new capabilities such as fast analysis of the entire radio frequency spectrum, realization of tunable and adaptive transceivers, fast and accurate targeting of the radio frequency signal, and distribution of reference signals without bandwidth limitations. All these capabilities pave the way for new generations of ultra-high-bandwidth, ultra-efficient radio systems and increasingly accurate, intelligent, and adaptive advanced radar systems.
It is this area of research that is the focus of the International Topical Meeting on Microwave Photonics 2024, organised in Pisa from Tuesday 17 to Friday 20 September by Antonella Bogoni, Full Professor at the Institute of Telecommunications, Informatics and Photonics of the Sant'Anna School, who holds the important role of General Chair of the annual conference that rotates between the Americas, the Asia-Pacific region and Europe.
The International Topical Meeting on Microwave Photonics is attended by over 100 experts from around the world and organised by the National Interuniversity Consortium for Telecommunications, with the participation of the Sant'Anna School. It is a forum for the presentation of new advances in this multidisciplinary research area, ranging from new integrated photonics technologies, new photonic devices for the radio world, and field trials of new prototype systems.
Microwave photonics is also involved in the development of photonics-assisted radio frequency transceivers for the development of high-frequency radar systems, up to millimetre waves, broadband radio communication systems and dual-use systems (telecommunications and surveillance). Photonic technologies are used for radio frequency signal generation to ensure extreme signal stability and flexibility, while signal detection is based on photonics-assisted analogue-to-digital converters to ensure high resolution in an all-digital approach, flexibility and bandwidth.
The research area coordinated by Antonella Bogoni has achieved important results in this area, with field trials for the first photonic radar and the first dual system, based on photonic technologies, which have been published in Nature. The first on-chip integrated prototypes of radio frequency transceivers based on photonics have already been developed by the team coordinated by Antonella Bogoni, and now additional prototypes based on increasingly efficient and low-power emerging materials are being developed.
Cover: Antonella Bogoni, professor of Photonics at the Institute of Telecommunications, Informatics and Photonics, Scuola Sant'Anna
