Two building blocks of microwave photonics filters in the presence of group delay ripple: a comparative survey

We have developed an analytic approach to investigate the effect of group delay ripple of the dispersive devices on the performance of two major building blocks of microwave-photonic filters. Firstly, performance of PM-based block in the presence of an arbitrary group delay ripple (GDR) is analyzed and compared with the ripple-free case to reveal the destructive effects of added group delay ripple. In the next step, we repeat the proposed approach for the AM-based one; again, the performance is compared with the ripple-free case. Two distortion metrics are also introduced to quantify this distortion. Comparison of the performance of two building blocks in the presence of group delay ripple unveils some interesting characteristics of microwave-photonic filters which have not been mentioned so far. We also add a general survey of two analyzed building blocks to present their respective most significant advantages and shortcomings. The simulated Optisystem results conform to our proposed analytical approach and verify the theoretical model.