For the first time, an integral equation approach for the numerical assessment of Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers (SOAs) is proposed. Performance comparisons between the suggested formulation and the traditional transfer matrix method are carried out in terms of the computation costs in solving the multi-wave mixing process in bidirectional, high-power SOAs. Computation efficiency improvement by more than an order of magnitude was observed with the proposed formulation, achieving better accuracy at equivalent spatial resolution. (c) 2006 Optical Society of America.