In recent years there has been a significant research effort in the area of high-speed electronics for communication. Higher speeds are required in order to take full advantage of the broadband capabilities of optical fibers. In particular integrated solutions are sought for practical systems to reduce cost and improve reliability. One of the target bit-rates for integrated fiber optic receivers is 10 Gb/s, which is consistent with the SONET hierarchical specification; practical transmission systems at these extremely high data rates will open the way to unexplored territory in networking. Each of these systems will require high-speed, low-cost interface electronics.

Currently, the bandwidth of optical fiber (1400 GHz-km for 1.3 single-mode fibers) and low losses (0.15 dB/km) can not be fully exploited. A bottleneck in system throughput exists due to speed limitations of the electronics in the receiver and transmitter. This bottleneck can be circumvented by optically multiplexing several lower data-rate channels through a single fiber. Both a 9.6 Gb/s wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) system, and a 20 Gb/s time-division multiplexing (TDM) system, have been demonstrated in laboratory experiments. These systems are capable of handling enormous data rates, because all of the high-speed processing, including amplification, can be done optically. These systems, however, are quite expensive and complicated.