Slow and fast light (SFL) effects have shown outstanding capabilities across the dynamic control of the speed of light in different media. Indeed, one of the most exciting motivations lies in the SFL potential application to the framework of photonic-assisted radio-frequency (RF) signal processing.

This Ph.D. thesis points out the performance evaluation of current SFL device platforms so as to enable several tasks required in the microwave photonics (MWP) field with the added value of tunability and broadband operation. In this context, technologies such as stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) effects in standard and polarization maintaining fibers (PMF), fiber Bragg gratings (FBG), semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA) and photonic crystal (PhC) waveguides have been under study. From km to mm-scale footprints, these SFL device platforms stand for the evolution towards the integration of MWP components and subsystems in photonic integrated circuits (PIC). Analytical and numerical models have been developed in order to understand the physical processes governing the SFL propagation on the different device platforms, as well as to describe the proposed MWP approaches. The performance analysis of two of the key functionalities required for MWP signal processing, i.e. tunable phase shifting and true time delay (TTD) operation, has been presented by means of the above proposed platforms. A TTD system, based on the so-called separate carrier tuning (SCT) technique, has been reported through SBS effects in standard fibers. In addition, the SBS interaction in PMFs has been evaluated aiming at performing dynamic Brillouin gratings (DBG), whose phase induced has been addressed. A distributed sensing system based on the continuous reflection of a short pulse along a weak FBG has also been demonstrated. A complete analysis of the nonlinear distortion introduced in the phase shifter has been addressed for cascaded structures comprising an SOA device under the coherent population oscillation (CPO) effect and an optical filtering stage. A novel fully-tunable 360º phase shifter implemented using only one SOA followed by a conveniently designed notch filter has also been reported. The suitability of exploiting the dispersive feature of a PhC waveguide to perform TTDs has been demonstrated. The phase shifting and true time delaying capabilities of the proposed approaches have been put to the test for implementing tunable and reconfigurable complex-valued multi-tap MWP filters. The performance of the reported technological platforms have been evaluated in terms of several figures of merit (FOM) so as to characterize their impact on the MWP link and also to identify the use of the most proper technology depending on the final processing task to be developed.