VII. SUMMARY, CONCLUSIONS, AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
We have presented and reviewed the most significant advances
in the field of MWP signal processing developed during
the last years. Special attention has been paid to describe the
novel techniques developed in order to overcome the major
limitations of these subsystems under incoherent regime. The
new and emergent field of integrated MWP filters has been
presented and though still in its infancy, it is clearly an exciting
future direction of research. The considerable development of
this field during the period under review has crystalized as well
in a number of novel application fields, both in the time and
the frequency domain, some of which have been presented and
reviewed as well. Next years will for sure witness novel efforts
directed towards the implementation of a fully integrated
MWP signal processor on a chipset. Novel materials and the
exploitation of nonlinear effects in integrated waveguides will
most probably enable future developments. This will, no doubt,
open the way to new and cost-effective subsystems capable of
supporting current application needs as well as future ones yet
to be unveiled.