Optical Engineering

Since the advent of optical communications, a greattechnological effort has been devoted to the exploitation of the huge bandwidth of optical fibers. Sta- ing from a few Mb/s single channel systems, a fast and constant technological development has led to the actual 10 Gb/s per channel dense wavelength - vision multiplexing (DWDM) systems, with dozens of channels on a single fiber. Transmitters and receivers are now ready for 40 Gb/s, whereas hundreds of channels can be simultaneously amplified by optical amplifiers. Nevertheless, despite such a pace in technological progress, optical c- munications are still in a primitive stage if compared, for instance, to radio communications: the widely spread on-off keying (OOK) modulation format is equivalent to the rough amplitude modulation (AM) format, whereas the DWDM technique is nothing more than the optical version of the frequency - vision multiplexing (FDM) technique. Moreover, adaptive equalization, ch- nel coding or maximum likelihood detection are still considered something “exotic” in the optical world. This is mainly due to the favourable char- teristics of the fiber optic channel (large bandwidth, low attenuation, channel stability, …), which so far allowed us to use very simple transmission and detection techniques.

This textbook provides a thorough and accessible treatment of semiconductor lasers from a design and engineering perspective. It includes both the physics of devices as well as the engineering, designing, and testing of practical lasers. The material is presented clearly with many examples provided. Readers of the book will come to understand the finer aspects of the theory, design, fabrication, and test of these devices and have an excellent background for further study of optoelectronics.

This book—unique in the literature—provides readers with the mathematical background needed to design many of the optical combinations that are used in astronomical telescopes and cameras. The results presented in the work were obtained by using a different approach to third-order aberration theory as well as the extensive use of the software package Mathematica®.

Optical networks based on wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) tech­ nology offer the promise to satisfy the bandwidth requirements of the Inter­ net infrastructure, and provide a scalable solution to support the bandwidth needs of future applications in the local and wide areas. In a waveleng- routed network, an optical channel, referred to as a lightpath, is set up between two network nodes for communication. Using WDM technology, an optical fiber link can support multiple non-overlapping wavelength channels, each of which can be operated at the data rate of 10 Gbps or 40 Gbps today.