Progress and Prospects of Nano-Optoelectronic Devices for Optical Communications

The advances of semiconductor heterojunction lasers and low loss optical fibers enabled a paradigm shift of telecommunications marked by Bell Labs' field trial in 1975. The bandwidth-distance product of data transmitted in a single fiber has increased by 7 orders of magnitude in the last 25 years. The late 1990s, optical communications witnessed another disruptive and yet exhilarating progress enabled by dense wavelength division multiplexed (DWDM) devices and broadband optical fiber amplifiers. WDM (or DWDM) can be explained as a method of sending many channels of data with different wavelengths of light in a single transmission medium, which, in this case, is a single optical fiber. The result is a capability to increase the aggregate transmission capacity with the number of wavelengths, in the hundreds.