Microwave photonic filter with multiple taps based on single semiconductor optical amplifier

A novel technique to implement a microwave photonic filter structure with multiple taps and arbitrary frequency response is presented. The proposed filter is based on Four-Wave Mixing (FWM) and Cross-Gain Modulation (XGM) in a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). Two-tap notch filter and three-tap bandpass filter with arbitrary bipolar tap generation, high rejection ratio, and widely tunability are successfully demonstrated in the experiment. Extensions to this concept by adding new probe light to provide more taps and improve the bandwidth to high frequency regime are also discussed.