WDM Devices, State of the Art

Abstract

An optical fiber transmission technology has made cost of transmission down by three orders of magnitude in the decade and, with the evolution of electronic switching technology supported by microelectronics technology, the telecommunication network is changing in its topology. Most of people think that a present single wavelength par fiber system is enough to increase of channel capacity for present telephone services, however, Wavelength Division Multiplex(WDM) becomes the center of interest among system people. The formal reason is that the WDM could be a breakthrough technology for introduction of flexible transport network which will ease the latent complexity of the future networks. In this session, we like to discuss on the transport layer, not photonic processing or photonic switching area, and on the enabling device technologies. This paper is intended to touch upon the general ideas of the topics.