**Preface XI**



Preface

processing of data.

To fulfill the ever increasing demands of internet based communication network, the speed of computing as well as the speed of data processing should be high enough with the transmission medium of enormous potential bandwidth having the vast amount of information handling capabilities. On the other hand, conventional electronic technology has already reached its ultimate speed limit (40 Gb/s) through the limitations of miniaturization of chips and bandwidth limitation, and obviously it will create data traffic jam in future internet based networking services. Therefore, a drastic solution of the acute problem is needed and the scientists and technologists promote their thinking to a totally different track from the conventional electronic system so that the computer performance and data signal processing can be further improved with potential communicating medium to such an extent that we would be

Optical computing and optical signal processing are strongly believed to be the most feasible technology that can provide the way out of the extreme limitations imposed on the speed and the complexity of present days computation and communication by conventional electronics. Optics provides higher bandwidth than electronics, which enables more information to be carried simultaneously and data to be processed in parallel with impressive increase in speed by several orders of magnitude over that of the electronic signals. If the parallelism of optics be associated with fast switching speed of optical devices, it would result in the surprising computational speed and

Considering the present scenario of speed and band width limitation of electronic computing, signal processing and future problem of data traffic, the scientists, technologists and researchers are working in the field of optical computing and optical signal processing in telecommunication network. The role of optical amplifier is indispensable in optical computation and optical data communication network. Over the past two decades, optical amplifiers such as Erbium doped fiber amplifier (EDFA), Raman Amplifier, Semiconductor Optical Amplifier (SOA) are the prime candidates as optical network functional components and have many functional applications such as wavelength conversion, regeneration, wavelength selection, booster, in-line amplification, in-node optical pre-amplification, and mid-span spectral inversion etc.

The selected topics in this book covers the roles of semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) as the building blocks of the next generation of optical access network, high

well prepared to accept the present and future challenges of data traffic.
