Abstract:Microwave photonic link with the features of large bandwidth, little weight and immunity of RFI can achieve signal distributing, transmission and processing by optical fiber, so it can be used for electronic warfare systems such as phased array and multi-beam former. However, its practical applications of engineering equipments may be limited by its noise figure and dynamic range. The limits to photonic link performance are analytically investigated in this paper. The experimental measurement shows realizable parameters under current process level: over an instantaneous bandwidth of 1GHz, this photonic link has a noise figure less than 5dB, and a dynamic range above 40dB.