Recent advances in photonic signal processing of microwave signals

Photonic signal processing allows direct processing of high frequency signals that are already in the optical domain, and offers a new powerful paradigm for processing high bandwidth signals to overcome the inherent bottlenecks caused by limited sampling speeds in conventional electrical signal processors. Recent new developments in wideband signal processing, which address the challenges of realizing photonic signal processors without dispersion induced RF distortion, having tunable and reconfigurable operation, high resolution performance, and all-optical complex coefficients for arbitrary signal processing, are presented.