Nikhil
In the past few decades, the applications of photonics have expanded dramatically in a number of areas. Just like electronics, photonics is widely spread across multiple application domains , ranging from consumer equipment to space applications. Photonics mainly deals with the generation, manipulation, transmission and detection of photons or light. Although the applications involving the use of light cover a wide electromagnetic spectrum, most photonic applications are based on visible and near infrared portion of the spectrum. The invention of the laser in 1960 followed by other developments such as the low-loss optical fiber and semiconductor laser in 1970, erbium doped fiber amplifier in 1985, etc., were the major contribution, which led to the advancement in optical fiber communication and today thousands of gigabytes of data travel around the globe every second through an extensive network of fiber cables which binds the internet . Optical fiber links have a very large data rate capacity for the point-to-point data transport. This aggregate data throughput has been further improved by implementation of multiplexing techniques such as DWDM, OTDM, and OCDM . However, fiber link capabilities become severely limited at the fiber links end points where the routing and switching takes place by the current CMOS electronics. Hence, there is a need to overcome this electronic bottleneck by signal processing in the optical domain.
