Special Issue on Applications of Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers

[...]SOAs have widely been adopted both by the research community and the industrial sector as a principal technological platform for the realization of a diverse range of applications with high performance. 2. [...]performance projections related to the physical layer are presented, and strategies for improvements in view of opening a route towards large-scale power efficient fast reprogrammable photonic integrated switching circuits are discussed. [...]the research activity on Optical Code Division Multiple Access (OCDMA) is represented by M.S. Ahmed and I. Glesk in Ref. Future Directions Following the Special Issue closure, more in-depth research using SOAs is foreseen to exploit them in applications such as direct signal amplification, external modulation, optical pulse generation and manipulation, all-optical signal processing, all-optical computing, all-optical combinational and sequential logic circuits, photonic switching fabrics, optical wireless communications, optical access networks, converged telecommunications networks, radio-over-fiber, microwave/terahertz photonics, optical interconnects, optical time division multiplexing, wavelength division multiplexing and optical code division multiple access systems and networks, advanced modulation formats, slow and fast light, optical test and measurement techniques, photonic integrated circuits, non-telecom (sensors, medical imaging), etc.