A silicon-on-insulator (SOI) narrow-passband filter based on cascaded Mach-Zehnder interferometers (MZIs) is theoretically simulated and experimentally demonstrated, indicating that the free spectral range (FSR) of the proposed filter can be significantly enlarged by increasing the number of the MZI stages. A filter using three-stage cascaded MZIs structure is successfully realized in the experiment and a 3-dB bandwidth of about 1.536 GHz and FSR about 13.5 GHz have been achieved. The performance of a downconverting analog photonic link (APL) employing the designed filter for microwave signal processing is also measured and a spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) as high as 104.1dB-Hz(2/3) is observed.