40 Gb/s reconfigurable optical logic gates based on FWM in silicon waveguide

Abstract

Here we experimentally demonstrate reconfigurable logic gates via four-wave-mixing (FWM) in silicon waveguide with an operating speed of up to 40 Gb/s. After demodulated by a 40-GHz delay interferometer (DI), four non-return-to-zero differential phase shift keying (NRZ-DPSK) signals with carefully selected wavelengths are launched into the waveguide at the same time. Thanks to the effective FWM in silicon nano-waveguide, a full set of the two-input logic minterms can be generated simultaneously, and arbitrary combinational logic functions are able to be realized by properly combining these minterms.

Recent advances in integrated optical directed logic operations for high performance optical computing: a review

“…In all-optical logic, the operands and operation results are all photons [15,16], thus all-optical logic computing can be implemented by a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) [17,18], micro-ring resonator (MRR) [13,19,20], photonic crystal [21][22][23][24], and plasmon waveguide [25][26][27]. Although a high operation speed can be achieved in all-optical logic, a "high power requirement" is usually inevitable for input light to excite the two-photon absorption or four-wave mixing effect of silicon waveguide [28][29][30][31] and the propagation loss for plasmon waveguide is relatively large [25][26][27], all of which are inconvenient for large-scale integration.…”

All‐optical reconfigurable multicast canonical logic units based on four‐wave mixing

“…On the other hand, thanks to the transparency to data rate and capability of simultaneous wavelength multicast [5], the four‐wave mixing (FWM)‐based scheme is considered as a promising candidate. Actually, FWM‐based multicast of CLUs can improve the computing capacity and operating flexibility [6].…”

“…As the fundamental elements of the all‐optical signal processing, the research of various optical logic gate functions, such as AND [2], NAND [3], have attracted a lot of interest in recent years. Among them, AND gates that can produce canonical logic units (CLUs) is more attractive [4, 5], since CLUs are the basic building blocks of complex all‐optical logic gates.…”

“…Owing to wavelength multicast of CLUs using FWM, the computing capacity of the scheme has been expanded and operating flexibility is improved. An FWM-based wavelength multicast scheme that realising simultaneous four different two-input CLUs is proposed and experimentally demonstrated [5]. This scheme focused on the simultaneous generation of various CLUs, and experimentally demonstrated complex all-optical logic gates constructed flexibly based on the wavelength multicast CLUs.…”