Novel method of all-optical OR operation using semiconductor optical amplifier Mach-Zehnder interferometers

We propose a novel method of all-optical OR operation using semiconductor optical amplifier MachZehnder interferometers. We demonstrate all-optical OR operation at 42.8 Gb/s using a hybrid photonic integrated device. Introduction All-optical logic operation can potentially alleviate the latency and power consumption of electronic processing in optical data networking. For example, the bottlenecks in the data networks can be relieved via all-optical header processing, which augments the capacity of the electronic routers by handling the most frequently occurring routing events in the optical plane at the line rate [1]. All-optical pattern processing using optical logic is essential for implementing such high-capacity all-optical data networking. All-optical logic operation using semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) has the advantage of compact size and lower switching powers requirements in comparison to other optical methods using passive optical nonlinearities. In this paper, we report a novel method of optical Boolean OR operation using semiconductor optical amplifier Mach-Zehnder interferometers (SOA-MZIs). The previous methods of all-optical OR operation using SOAs relied on saturation of cross phase modulation (XPM) in SOAs, the impact of which is further enhanced using optical filters implemented by either a Michelson interferometer [2], delay-line optical interferometer [3], or narrow band-pass optical filter [4]. The method we propose is advantageous as it use the same SOA-MZI structure that can be also used for AND, XOR, and NOT operations without any structural changes.