A preliminary study on non contact thermal monitoring of microwave photonic systems

Microwave photonic systems are more susceptible to thermal fluctuations due to thermo-optic effect. In order to stabilize the performance of photonic components, thermal monitoring is achieved by using thermistors placed at any arbitrary location along the component. This work presents non contact thermography of a fully functional microwave photonic system. The temperature profile of printed circuit board (PCB) and photonic integrated circuit (PIC) is obtained using Fluke FLIR (A65) camera. We performed Otsu's thresholding to segment heat centers located across PCB as well 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 visible and thermal images. We demonstrate this method on the circuit board with active electrical/photonic elements and were able to observe thermal profile of these components.