Abstract
Guided-wave optical devices are important for serial high-speed processing, particularly when information enters or exits in optical format. Optical logic gates permit "intelligence" or decision-making capability to be introduced into optical transmission or network systems. We show numerically that an all-optical, cascadable, low-energy, soliton logic gate with a fan-out of 2.7 and an energy contrast of 5.5 can be made in a moderately birefringent erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) that is one soliton period long. The switching results from large frequency shifts associated with cross-phase modulation, birefringent walk-off and 8dB of bandwidth-limited gain. For sub-picosecond pulses and EDFA's with a zero dispersion wavelength between 1.4 and 1.5 microns, one soliton period corresponds to between 5 and 20m of fiber. In contrast, typical nonlinear optical loop mirrors [1] or soliton-dragging logic gates [2] use between 300m and several kilometers of fiber to accumulate slowly a phase or timing shift, resulting in a latency of at least several microseconds and a sensitivity to environmental changes.
© 1993 Optical Society of America
PDF ArticleMore Like This
M. Vaziri, K. Ahn, B. C. Barnett, G. R. Williams, M. N. Islam, K. O. Hill, and B. Malo
CThB4 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO:S&I) 1995
M. N. Islam, C. E. Soccolich, B. J. Hong, C.-J. Chen, J. R. Simpson, and D. J. DiGiovanni
TuF3 Integrated Photonics Research (IPR) 1992
M.N. Islam, C.J. Chen, and C.E. Soccolich
WD2 Optical Computing (IP) 1991