Advances in the Development of Spectrally Pure Microwave Photonic Synthesizers

Microwave Photonics is promising for generation and synthesis of radio frequency, microwave as well as millimeter wave signals of outstanding spectral purity and arbitrary wave form. High optical quality factors lead to the low noise of the signals. Small size of the optical components results in small form factor of the photonic devices. As such, the photonic oscillators outperform the majority of high frequency microwave ones of purely electronic nature. In this letter we review the major recent advances and trends as well as discuss future steps in the development of the field.