Data hungry applications like streaming and gaming but as well new services like the Internet of Things, autonomous driving, and Industry X.0 lead to a steady increase in the worldwide data rates. Higher data rates require the processing of higher-bandwidth signals. Standard CMOS-based digital signal processors (DSP), analog-to-digital converters (ADC), and digital-to-analog converters (DAC) are approaching their limits. Due to the increasing losses for higher frequencies, especially the jitter, the power consumption and the accompanied heat dissipation are a severe problem for the processing of high-bandwidth signals. The higher losses lead to a heating of the chip which cannot be dissipated for very small integrated structures. Photonics instead can handle much higher bandwidths. A dense wavelength division multiplexed (DWDM) channel has a typical bandwidth of 40 GHz, and integrated modulators with bandwidths above 100 GHz are commercially available. Therefore, photonics may help to keep pace with extremely high data rates even for future applications. The basic idea of photonics assisted signal processing is to use photonics for the down-conversion of high-bandwidth signals into parallel low-bandwidth ones and to use standard electronic CMOS based ADC, DAC, or DSP with a much lower bandwidth to process these signals in parallel branches.