Overview: In modern electronic warfare and radar systems, because the microwave signal received by the receiver has the characteristics of large instantaneous bandwidth, multiple signal types, wide frequency coverage and diversified forms, it is required that the receiver must also have large instantaneous receiving bandwidth, be able to process the multi-frequency and multi-form signals arriving at the same time in real time, and the receiver also needs to have high sensitivity and high resolution. The channelized receiver can divide the received wideband signal into sub-bands of different frequencies, and convert all sub-bands into the same intermediate frequency signal or baseband signal by using down-conversion, which not only greatly reduces the requirements of the system for the ADC but also realizes simultaneous reception of multi-frequency signals. The digital channelized receiver has the advantages of flexible tuning and high precision. However, due to the severe limitation of ADC sampling rate and working bandwidth, it cannot meet the processing requirements of highly intensive ultra wideband signals. Compared with coaxial cable, optical fiber has the advantages of low loss, strong anti electromagnetic interference ability, small volume, light weight and so on. It has become an important transmission medium in the field of communication. The fusion of microwave technology and optical fiber technology has produced a new interdisciplinary subject--microwave photonics. It can flexibly realize the mutual conversion of optical wave and microwave signal, and has a series of advantages such as large instantaneous bandwidth of photonics, wide working frequency band, high isolation, anti electromagnetic interference, etc., which provides a new solution for the research of new channelized receiver.

In this paper, a zero-IF channelized receiver based on microwave photon series is proposed. A scheme for realizing zero-intermediate frequency (IF) channelized receiver using a dual-polarization quadrature phase-shift keying (DP-QPSK) modulator and a narrow-band optical filter is proposed. The channelized system only requires one optical frequency combs to achieve zero-IF multi-channel reception of wideband signals, and the spacing of the optical frequency comb only needs to be equal to the sub-channel width, which is very easy to implement. It is found that using photonic IQ demodulation and balanced detection and reception technology can not only eliminate many disadvantages of the traditional zero-IF receiver, including local oscillator (LO) leakage, DC offset, even-order distortion, and in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) imbalance, but also reduce the bandwidth and sample rate of the analog-to-digital converter (ADC). It is theoretically proved that the RF signal with a bandwidth of 3 GHz can be divided into five sub-channels with a bandwidth of 600 MHz and finally demodulated to I/Q basebands, which is also verified with simulation.