Abstract

We describe the application of ultrafast, all-optical logic gates to a soliton-based local or metropolitan area network. The slotted ring network discussed here serves a few hundred users and uses self routing packet switching with a 100 Gbps peak data rate and a 1.25 GHz packet rate. This is a "light-pipe" system where the data remains in optical format throughout the network, converting to electronics only at the host and destination nodes. The packet header (or address) is selected and decoded using recently demonstrated soliton dragging and trapping logic gates [1,2], which are long latency, ultrafast fiber devices that satisfy all cascadability and logic requirements for a digital optical processor. A ring network is one potential application of these logic devices that requires only a handful of gates per node.

© 1991 Optical Society of America