Nonuniformly-spaced photonic microwave delayline filter

A new technique to implement a photonic microwave delay-line filter based on nonuniform tap spacing with arbitrary bandpass response is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. Being different from a regular photonic microwave delay-line filter where the taps are uniformly spaced, the proposed filter in this paper has nonuniformly-spaced taps. The key feature of this technique is that a photonics microwave delay-line filter with arbitrary bandpass response can be realized with only positive taps via nonuniform tap spacing. The use of the proposed technique to implement a flat-top bandpass filter is experimentally demonstrated.