"Photonics lies at the heart of a revolution in communications and has shown great potential in a wide range of applications from data links to biosensors, leading to the growing efforts in the development of photonic integrated circuits for optical signal processing functions. As part of this development, subwavelength grating (SWG) structures are opening more and more opportunities in the design of integrated photonic devices to contribute to the design of more complex photonic circuits. The success can be attributed to the advantages that SWG structures are able to offer; such as control over the refractive index and birefringence of optical materials without changing the standard fabrication process, which allows for the characteristics of optical devices to be optimized for specific requirements of the applications.In this thesis, we demonstrate and investigate the possibilities that SWGs offer in design of wavelength selective filters with applications in optical signal processing and microwave photonics. We firstly propose and demonstrate a novel design of contra-directional couplers (contra-DCs), in which an SWG waveguide replaces one of the asymmetric waveguides of the conventional designs. Fabricated devices on the SOI platform show over 35 dB suppression of undesired codirectional coupling and larger than 120 nm spectral range free from the interference of intrawaveguide reflections thanks to the large optical phase-mismatch between the segmented SWG waveguide and its nearby continuous waveguide. We study the effects of tailoring the period of the SWG waveguide, the gap distance between the two waveguides, and the coupling length on the spectral characteristics of the device where changing the gap distance from 100 nm up to 500 nm allows for bandwidths from 18.2 nm down to 0.9 nm. Next, we tailor the spectral characteristics of SWG-based contra-DCs. By tapering the gap distance between the SWG and strip waveguides, we demonstrate a compromise between sidelobe suppression and pass-band/stop-band extinction ratio such that the performance of the device as a potential optical add-drop multiplexer is improved. The designs with different pass-band bandwidths of 12 nm, 9 nm, and 6 nm show 10 dB to 20 dB sidelobe suppression ratio and 15 dB to 35 dB extinction ratio. We also obtain a resonant transmission peak in the stop-band of the spectral response of the device by introducing a p phase shift into the gratings of the SWG waveguide. The resonant peak has 1 nm bandwidth and 7 dB extinction ratio, where the use of the SWG waveguide in the structure of such coupler allows the characteristics of the resonant peak to be highly sensitive to the cladding material, which is of strong desire in integrated sensing applications.Finally, as wavelength division multiplexing over optical links provides an effective solution for the bandwidth challenge of off-chip and on-chip communications, we demonstrate a compact silicon photonic four-channel optical add-drop multiplexer enabled by SWG-based contra-DCs. Pass-bands of the device show on-chip insertion losses below 1.8 dB with wide 3dB bandwidth of ~6.7 nm suitable for coarse wavelength division multiplexing (CWDM) in short-reach optical interconnect applications. Transmission of 10 Gbit/s data stream through different channels of the multiplexer results in negligible power penalties while interferometric crosstalk-induced power penalties are below 2.8 dB." --