Within the past few decades, information technologies have been evolving
at a tremendous rate, causing profound changes to our world and our ways
of life. In particular, fiber optics has been playing an increasingly
crucial role within the telecommunication revolution. Not only most
long-distance links are fiber based, but optical fibers are increasingly
approaching the individual end users, providing wide bandwidth links to
support all kinds of data-intensive applications such as video, voice,
and data services. As an engineering discipline, fiber optics is both
fascinating and challenging. Fiber optics is an area that incorporates
elements from a wide range of techno- gies including optics,
microelectronics, quantum electronics, semiconductors, and networking.
As a result of rapid changes in almost all of these areas, fiber optics
is a fast evolving field. Therefore, the need for up-to-date texts that
address this growing field from an interdisciplinary perspective
persists. This book presents an overview of fiber optics from a
practical, engineering perspective. Therefore, in addition to topics
such as lasers, detectors, and optical fibers, several topics related to
electronic circuits that generate, detect, and process the optical
signals are covered. In other words, this book attempts to present fiber
optics not so much in terms of a field of "optics" but more from the
perspective of an engineering field within "optoelectronics.
