Microwave photonic processing of high-speed microwave signals

Photonic signal processing offers a new powerful paradigm for processing high speed signals, due to its inherent advantages of wide bandwidth and immunity to electromagnetic interference. Microwave photonic frequency conversion is essential in wide-ranging optical-wireless system applications, and with the ever-increasing drive to higher operating frequencies, microwave photonic mixers, filters and modulation techniques that integrate with fibre transmission offer attractive benefits to RF systems. Recent new methods in wideband microwave photonic mixers, which address the challenges of realising high conversion efficiency and linearised operation, are described. Also recent techniques to realise microwave photonic filters with arbitrary spectral shape and wide tunability based on spectrum slicing and manipulation using a programmable liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) array, are described, along with the realization of a new integrated silicon-on-insulator dual micro-ring optical single-sideband modulation technique for microwave fibre transmission and optical component characterization.