Over the past 30 years, the world has witnessed the rapid development of optoelectronic devices based on III-V compound semiconductors. Past effort has mainly been directed to the theoretical understanding of, and the technology development for, these devices in applications in telecommunication networks and compact disk (CD) data storage. With the growing deployment of such devices in new fields such as illumination, display, fiber sensor, fiber gyro, optical coherent tomography, etc., research on optoelectronic devices, especially on those light emitting components, continues to expand with the pursuit of many experimental explorations on new materials such as group-III nitride alloys and II-VI compounds and novel structures such as quantum wires, dots, and nanostructures.

As the manufacturing technology becomes mature and standardized and few uncertainties are left, design and simulation become the major issue in the performance enhancement of existing devices and in the development of new devices. Recent progress in numerical techniques as well as computing hardware has provided a powerful platform that makes sophisticated computer-aided design, modeling, and simulation possible. So far, the development of optoelectronic devices seems to replicate the history of electronic devices: from discrete to integrated, from technology intensive to design intensive, from trial-and-error experiments to computer-aided simulation and optimization.

The purpose of this book is to bridge the gap between the theoretical framework and the solution to real-world problems, or, more specifically, to bridge the gap between our knowledge acquired on electromagnetic field theory, quantum mechanics, and semiconductor physics and optoelectronic device design and modeling through advanced numerical tools.