This paper reviews some of the recent effort in the area of microwave-optical interaction as applied to enhance the utility of the active integrated antennas and arrays. The paper consists of two parts. In the first part, the optical bias is used as a hidden port to control the characteristics of the active integrated antennas. Two examples will be presented. In the second part, an optical carrier is used for remoting of active integrated antenna for beam control.

The properties of the optical-microwave mixing process are investigated in detail. To describe these processes a new approach, the parametric method is introduced which provides a better description of the mixing phenomenon. The paper presents new experimental results on and new theoretical analysis methods for the optical-microwave mixing process and also for its dynamic behavior. The dynamic properties are very important in many applications when the light is intensity modulated by a high frequency or high bit rate signal. A remarkable decrease is observed in the mixing product with increasing optical modulation frequency. There are two reasons for it: the time constant exhibited by the depletion region between the substrate and the epitaxial layer and the optically induced substrate current which is increasing with the modulation frequency and doesn't contribute to the mixing effect. Understanding the optical-microwave mixing process provides new solutions for many applications. For example the optical-microwave mixing techniques offers several advantages in case of optical reception. In the detection process the modulation signal can be transposed to an intermediate frequency band (instead of the baseband) making possible a lower noise reception in a wider band. Another important and advantageous application is in the reception of subcarrier modulated optical signals.