HIGH-TEMPERATURE SUPERCONDUCTIVE WIDE-BAND COMPRESSIVE RECEIVERS

Wideband compressive receivers are an attractive application niche for analog high temperature superconductive (HTS) microwave filters, Chir p filters form the basis of compressive receivers, implementing a chir p-transform algorithm in the analog domain for real-time spectral anal ysis. HTS tapped-delay-line chirp filters are an enabling technology f or instantaneous bandwidths greater than 1 GHz, and have evolved suffi ciently to support dispersive delays as long as 40 ns with multigigahe rtz bandwidths and time-bandwidth products in excess of 100. Long disp ersive delays have been obtained using a bonded/thinned-wafer techniqu e to fabricate YBa2Cu3O7-partial derivative stripline devices on 5-mil -thick, 2-in-diameter LaAlO3 substrates, These filters have produced b etter than -18-dB error sidelobes. in addition, a 3-GHz-band width HTS compressive cueing receiver was recently delivered to the Naval Resea rch Laboratory to he flown on the high temperature superconductor spac e experiment (HTSSE), and demonstrations have been performed combining HTS chirp filters with conventional compressive-receiver hardware, A novel compressive cryoreceiver architecture is proposed combining HTS, cryo electronic, and advanced high-speed semiconductor technologies. The proposed receiver will rival the sensitivity of a narrowband recei ver while providing unprecedented wideband instantaneous frequency cov erage, Future developments will extend the bandwidth capability, Detai led comparisons are made to an all-digital receiver and to channelized -filter receiver architectures, An HTS compressive receiver is project ed to be clearly superior in overall size, weight, and power, Applicat ions include electronic warfare and dynamic molecular spectroscopy for remote sensing.