Arbitrary response design for incoherent microwave photonic filters based on basic filtering cell combination

An arbitrary response designing method for incoherent microwave photonic filter (MPF) is proposed and experimentally verified. By decomposing the response function of incoherent MPFs into basic filtering cells, arbitrary responses can be designed by simply choosing and recombining proper filtering cells. With the proposed method, required implementing parameters for arbitrary responses can be determined easily, which will bring great convenience for realistic MPF implementation based on existing structures. A simple band-pass MPF is designed as an example and a verification experiment is set up to testify the designing results. Good accordance between the theoretical and the experimental results are obtained.