Nonlinear S-Parameter Behavioral Model of a Photonic Radar Transceiver Chipset for Automotive Applications

This paper presents a method to model monolithically integrated photonic radar transceiver (TRX) with optical local oscillator (LO) distribution in silicon germanium (SiGe) electronic photonic integrated circuits (EPICs). The model proposed approximates the behavior of the nonlinear scattering (S)-parameters and noise figure of each building block of the TRX chipset by Laplace polynomials and hyperbolic tangent functions. The modular approach of the model allows to optimize hardware components with respect to the entire TRX system, and fault identification with reduced computational effort. The proposed method is validated using the first monolithically integrated photonic radar transceiver chipset and shows excellent agreement with the post layout simulation results and, including the photodiode (PD) bandwidth (BW) degradation, also with the measurements.