Abstract
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     Microwave arbitrary signals are widely used in different application fields such as radar, communications, imaging and modern instrumentation. During the last decade, a great number of proposals for waveform generation in the optical domain have been carried out because of electrical systems limitation to generate signals at high frequencies with large bandwidth. A review of all proposals has led us to carry out a classification according to the more relevant generation techniques. 
     The main objective of this doctoral thesis lies in the proposal, analysis and experimental validation of a technique which permits microwave signals generation by means of photonic filter structures. Specifically, the filters used in this work are based on the incoherent optical signals processing by a dispersive element. We performed a theoretical development which allowed us to obtain the transfer function of the equivalent photonic filter in order to calculate the generated signal from the optical signal power spectral density, dispersion and electrical input signal. In this way, it is possible to extend several photonic filtering advantages to signal waveform generation field. Likewise, two operation regimes are distinguished, non-linear and linear, depending whether it is necessary or not to consider the second order of the dispersive element. In linear regime, several structures are presented by using different type of optical signals such as a set of laser sources and a broadband source sliced by different kind of optical filters. Moreover, an additional structure including differential detection at the output of an interferometer is presented. In order to show the different capabilities of these proposals, the generation of signals according to impulse radio UWB and multiband UWB technologies has been demonstrated. The flexibility of these schemes has permitted to obtain waveforms according to the FCC spectral requirements as well as an excellent tuning and reconfiguration range. On the other hand, the interest on non-linear regime has been focused on the differential detection structure. In order to show the system capabilities, several examples of chirped pulses have been generated. More specifically, an independent control of signal parameters has been experimentally demonstrated such as the time-bandwidth product, the central frequency and the envelope according to the dispersion, the interferometer and the optical signal settings. In this work, it has been demonstrated a tuning range up to 10 GHz and a maximum time-bandwidth product of 26.