title: Figures of merit for microwave photonic phase shifters based on semiconductor optical amplifiers.
abstract: We theoretically and experimentally compare the performance of two fully tunable phase shifter structures based on semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA) by means of several figures of merit common to microwave photonic systems. A single SOA stage followed by a tailored notch filter is compared with a cascaded implementation comprising three SOA-based phase shifter stages. Attention is focused on the assessment of the RF net gain, noise figure and nonlinear distortion. Recommendations on the performance optimization of this sort of approaches are detailed.
authors.affiliation: ITEAM Research Institute, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Valencia, Spain. juasandu@upvnet.upv.es
authors.forename: Juan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Sancho
authors.forename: Juan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lloret
authors.forename: Ivana
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Gasulla
authors.forename: Salvador
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Sales
authors.forename: José
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Capmany