Ultra-wideband and adaptive microwave photonic signal processing

Microwave photonics merges the worlds of RF and photonics to enable new paradigms in the processing of high speed signals. Besides its inherent advantages of extremely high time-bandwidth product and natural immunity to electromagnetic interference, a fundamental benefit of photonic techniques for processing wideband electromagnetic systems is that the entire RF/mm-wave spectrum constitutes only a small fraction of the carrier optical frequency. This enables dynamic reconfiguration of the processor characteristics over multi-GHz bandwidths, and offers the ability to realise functions in microwave systems that are either very complex or, perhaps not even possible in the RF domain. This paper describes recent new advances in microwave photonic signal processors including ultra-wideband optically controlled phased array beamforming; widely tunable and switchable filters; wideband frequency converters; high-resolution multiple frequency microwave photonic measurement systems; and photonic RF memory structures.