中心博士生李波同学的工作——Automatic discovery of optimal microwave photonic architectures in a complete topological space（在完备拓扑空间中自动发现最优微波光子架构）的相关成果最近被Optics Express期刊接收，该工作得到了国家自然科学基金（T2225023, 62205203），上海科学技术与创新行动计划（24JD1401400），上海交通大学2030计划（WH510363002/004）部分资助。
微波光子学（MWP）融合了微波和光子学的技术优势，已成为推动雷达、无线通信和计算系统演进的突破性驱动力。然而，传统MWP系统设计策略主要依赖专家的经验知识和物理直觉，因此在所有可能性中探索理论上最优的系统架构具有挑战性。
本工作提出一种基于自动迭代与优化的MWP系统设计策略，可发现最优架构。该策略将MWP系统架构抽象为由基本信号处理单元及其拓扑连接构成的图结构。随后，开发了拓扑生成与参数搜索算法，以在完备拓扑空间中自动寻找理论最优架构。结果表明，该策略不仅能找到已知优化的架构，还能发现性能更优且系统成本更低的非直观最优架构。该策略突破了传统设计策略的经验限制，为未来雷达、无线通信及计算系统中寻找高性能、低成本的MWP架构提供了有前景的框架。
摘要：
Microwave photonics (MWPs) has become a ground-breaking driving force for the evolution of radar, wireless communication, and computing systems, as it merges the technical advantages of microwave and photonics. However, the conventional design strategies of MWP systems are based on experts’ empirical knowledge and physical intuitions, therefore, it is challenging to explore the theoretically optimal system architectures among all possibilities. Here, we present an MWP system design strategy that can discover the optimal architecture by automatic iteration and optimization. In the proposed strategy, MWP system architectures are abstracted as graphs represented by basic signal processing units and topological connections of these units. Then, we create the topology generation and parameter search algorithms to find the theoretically optimal architectures in a complete topological space. Results demonstrate that the proposed strategy can not only find the known-good architectures, but also discover non-intuitive optimal architectures with better performance and lower system costs. This strategy breaks through the empirical limitations of conventional design strategies and provides a promising framework for finding high-performance and low-cost MWP systems for future radar, wireless communication, and computing systems.