A Preliminary Study on Non Contact Thermal Monitoring of Microwave Photonic Systems

Microwave photonic systems are more susceptible to thermal fluctuations due tothermo-optic effect. In order to stabilize the performance of photonic components, thermal monitoringis achieved by using thermistors placed at any arbitrary location along the component. This workpresents non contact thermography of a fully functional microwave photonic system. The temperatureprofile of printed circuit board (PCB) and photonic integrated circuit (PIC) is obtained using FlukeFLIR (A65) camera. We performed Otsu’s thresholding to segment heat centers located across PCB aswell as PIC. The infrared and visible cameras used in this work have different field of view, therefore,after applying morphological methods, we performed image registration to synchronize both visibleand thermal images. We demonstrate this method on the circuit board with active electrical/photonicelements and were able to observe thermal profile of these components.