Evolutionary design of all-optical microwave filters

A design methodology for all-optical microwave filters has been developed using genetic algorithms. Genetic algorithms confer a number of advantages on the problem of synthesising all-optical filters. Amongst these is the ability to handle preferred values for components, to give different weighting to various filter attributes (e.g. size or number of components), and to maximise simultaneously different attributes of a filter. The power of this new design procedure has been illustrated with the design of an all-optical filter that meets a demanding band-pass specification