Emerging Technology for Fiber Optic Data Communication

Due to the explosive growth in the demand for network bandwidth, devices and subsystems that can support gigabit and multigigabit throughput has become increasingly important. In this chapter, we review several emerging technologies for fiber optical data communication. In particular, we focus on the technologies for wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), as it is the most important technique in advancing the communication bandwidth for the next generation broadband networks.