The broad bandwidth and low loss offered by modern photonics have led to an ever-increasing interest in the design and implementation of photonically assisted solutions for the generation, processing, control and distribution of microwave signals, an area called microwave photonics. In this article, a tutorial on microwave photonics is presented with an emphasis on optical generation of microwa...

This paper overviews the history of a class of varactor tuned bandpass filters. Since the miniaturization as well as the high performance of the tunable bandpass filters is required for the next generation mobile communication systems, the discussion is focused on the various planar type tunable filters including active configurations. Brief design concepts of various tunable filter configurati...

Picosecond duration X-band microwave pulses have been generated using a laser-activated photoconductive switch. These pulses have been used to observe the microwave reflection from optically excited germanium. The reflection measurements indicate that the microwave pulse has a full width at half-maximum of 50 ps and is synchronized with picosecond precision to the laser pulse. A high-resolution...

We explore photonic microwave signal generation utilizing the heterogeneous silicon-III/V platform and the benefits and execution of a fully integrated chip. Optimization of device components is discussed, including high-speed waveguide photodiodes and widely tunable lasers. Microwave signal generation is demonstrated beyond 110 GHz. Exploration into dual signal generation with a tracking fixed...

We provide an overview of techniques for the photonic generation of arbitrary RF waveforms, particularly those suitable for impulse radio or multi-band ultrawideband (UWB)-over-fiber transmission, and chirped microwave waveforms, with an emphasis on microwave photonic filtering and optical spectral shaping followed by wavelength-to-time mapping. We discuss possibilities for integrating the vari...

A novel approach to photonic generation of phase-coded microwave signals based on optical pulse shaping and time delay is proposed. In the proposed approach, an optical short pulse train is inserted with a specified amount of time-delay to certain pulses, and then converted into super-Gaussian microwave pulses based on the optical pulse shaping technique. By properly adjusting the time-delay, p...

Recent progress in semiconductor quantum dot based mode locked lasers is discussed. Sub-picosecond pulse generation and extremely low phase noise have been demonstrated for both InAs/GaAs and InAs/InP material systems. Applications include e.g. OTDM sources and frequency comb generation for WDM systems, all-optical clock recovery at high bit rate or microwave photonics . Keywordsself-assembled ...