Due to the growing, insatiable thirst for information, both commercial and defense communications are driving towards increasingly higher data rates and wider bandwidths of operation. This in turn is driving systems toward higher operating frequencies, which more easily supports larger channel bandwidths. For example, today’s cellular networks (i.e., cellular networks …

The explosive growth of optical communication technology in the past decades has revolutionized the telecom industry and created a global communication infrastructure with optical networks. Optical communication links and networks are essential for the Internet backbone as well as for interconnects used in data centres and high-performance computing systems. The increasing …